Restrictions on Custom and Lookalike Audiences

There are some restrictions to custom and lookalike audiences you should know about related to health and finances.

Here’s what you need to know…

The Restrictions

When viewing Meta’s developer documentation on lookalike audiences, I stumbled on this message:

Beginning September 2, 2025, we will start to roll out more proactive restrictions on custom audiences that may suggest information not permitted under our terms. For example, any custom audience or lookalike audience suggesting specific health conditions (e.g., “arthritis”, “diabetes”) or financial status (e.g., “credit score”, “high income”) will be flagged and prevented from being used to run ad campaigns.

This went into effect on September 2nd, so it flew under the radar (or at least my radar). If Meta flags the custom audience, you can’t create a lookalike audience based on it. And you can’t use either in targeting.

Can You Get Around It?

I’m not sure how exactly Meta flags these audiences. But I assume it would need to be based on how you name it or the header rows in the custom audience.

And I’m not, of course, recommending that you get around restrictions by carefully naming these things. Even if this is how the audiences are flagged, one of the worst violations you can face is for “circumventing systems.”

This would certainly qualify, and an account ban would likely follow.