Photo for illustration only. It is not an official notice.

India’s rummy advertisers lost one of their main paid channels in January 2026. Google Ads removed rummy and daily fantasy sports from the promotions it would accept for users in India, with the switch dated 21 January and the notice posted on 7 January.

The company said the change was meant to follow local legal requirements. It did not publish a longer explanation. The practical result is narrower: those two categories came off the list of gambling ads Google would accept for India. Other countries were not part of this notice.

The timing sits ahead of the gaming law. Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act in 2025. The Act and the 2026 rules took effect on 1 May 2026, and public notices describe a ban on online money games, including paid rummy, whether an operator calls the game skill or chance. Google’s ad block therefore landed before the law’s start date, not after it.

A competition case ran alongside this. Winzo had complained that Google’s earlier Play Store pilot let rummy and fantasy apps in, while leaving other skill-game apps out. In September 2026 the Competition Commission of India closed that inquiry. It said there was no longer a lawful real-money gaming market on Google Play or Google Ads in which access could be granted to one group and refused to another. The Commission also noted that Google had stopped taking those ads in January 2026. The closure was not a ruling on whether Google’s older pilot was fair.

For advertisers, the line is the campaign target. A rummy or daily fantasy promotion pointed at India can be disapproved. A news story about the policy is not itself an ad. Listings on this site are not an offer to play, and they are not a reading of what the Supreme Court may still decide in challenges to the Act.