Has Meta removed placement controls from ad sets?

Advertisers began reporting on 25 August 2026 that the placement controls were disappearing, and the coverage quotes an in-product notice about excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems no longer being available. Meta has published no announcement and the Help Centre still describes manual placement selection as available. Checked on 14 September 2026, the selector and the exclusions were both still present in these accounts, which is consistent with a staged rollout rather than a completed one.

Is a value rule the same as excluding a placement?

No. A value rule can reduce a bid by up to 90 percent, which makes a placement expensive to win but never impossible. An exclusion removes the placement. If brand safety work is stored as a list of excluded placements, replacing exclusions with value rules converts a hard stop into a discount.

Can you still choose the crop for each placement in Meta ads?

Not in these accounts as of 14 September 2026. The flow asks for up to around ten creatives inside a single ad and crops them automatically. Choosing the crop, the style or the format for each one by hand is no longer offered, although third party guides dated 2026 still describe per placement customisation as available.

What should an advertiser do while placement exclusions still work?

Record the current state. Capture every ad set, what is excluded in it, and the date. There is no export for a setting that no longer exists and no backfill for a configuration that was never written down, so the record has to be made while the control is still present.

Meta Ads · Platform changes

Meta still lets me exclude placements. It stopped letting me crop.

On 14 September 2026 I opened my own Meta ad accounts. The placement selector was there. The exclusions were there. Three weeks after the notice everyone quoted, I had lost none of it. What I had lost was something else entirely, and I have not seen a single person write about it.

What to do today ↓

What the internet says I lost

Since 25 August 2026, advertisers have been reporting that placement controls are disappearing from Meta ad sets. The coverage quotes an in-product notice saying that excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets, and says the replacement is a value rule that can cut a bid by up to 90 percent.

That difference matters more than it sounds. A 90 percent discount is not an off switch. If your brand-safety work lives in a list of excluded placements, a discount does not protect you. It just makes the placement expensive.

Meta has published nothing. The Help Centre still describes manual placement selection as available. So everything above is what other people are seeing, reported in good faith by people I trust. It is not an announcement, and this page does not treat it as one.

Reported by Jon Loomer and PPC Land.

What I actually found, and when

I checked on 14 September 2026. Three things, in my own accounts:

The placement selector is still there.
I can still exclude placements. Not just choose from a list. Actually uncheck.
The thing I have lost is in the creative, not the ad set.

Three weeks after the notice that made the rounds, the control everyone is writing an obituary for was sitting in my account, working.

A control that has not been taken away yet is worth saying out loud, because nobody publishes it has not happened to me yet. That absence of news is not a story. It is just the truth about how these rollouts actually move, and it stays invisible unless somebody bothers to write down the date they looked.

So what did I lose?

The per-creative format control.

The flow now asks for up to around ten creatives inside a single ad, and Meta crops them for you. What is gone is the manual part.

You used to be able to choose the crop for each format. Not accept a crop. Choose it. One upload, and then you decided what the square version kept and what the vertical version kept, format by format. That control is gone. The assets go in, the crops come back, and the only say you have left is whether to use what you are given.

Why can both stories be true at once?

Read the notice again. It says excluding. Not selecting.

Most of the coverage, and the briefing I work from, flattened those into one thing: Meta is removing placement controls. They are not the same control, and conflating them is how you end up arguing about whether something is gone while looking at two different screens.

Add a staged rollout on top, which is normal for Meta, and you get the situation I am in. The reports are honest. My account is real. Both are true on the same day.

And here is the part that should bother you more than the change itself. On what Meta lets you do right now, there are not two sources that agree. Including the ones whose job is writing the guide. The guides dated 2026 still describe per-placement manual cropping as available. It is not available to me.

The obvious objections, answered

You are just behind the rollout

Probably. That is the point. If I am behind it, then the window in which I can still record what my account could do is open, and yours might be too. Being behind a rollout is only useless if you do not write anything down while you are.

Maybe the control moved and you did not find it

Also possible, and I have not ruled it out. I am telling you what the editor offered me on a date, not what Meta did. If it moved, that is still a change in what an operator can reach without hunting for it.

This is a complaint about a user interface

Losing the per-format crop is a complaint about who makes a decision. Where your ad runs, and how it looks when it gets there, are both decisions. One of them stopped being mine, quietly, while everyone was watching the other one.

What I still do not know

Whether the placement exclusions survive in my accounts next month. I have no way to know, and neither does anyone quoting the notice.
What Meta calls the creative change. I can describe what the editor does and no longer does. I have not seen a name for it in Meta’s own documentation, so I am not going to invent one.
Whether this is account-level, region-level or a plain staged rollout. One operator, a handful of accounts, one date. That is the size of my sample and I am not going to dress it up.

What to do today, if you can still exclude

If your ad sets still let you uncheck placements, take the screenshot now. Every ad set, what is excluded, today’s date.

Not because I think you will need it in court. Because the day it goes, nobody is going to hand you a list of what you had. There is no export of a setting that no longer exists, and there is no backfill for a decision you never wrote down.

Writing down what you still have is the whole trick, and it is not a clever one. The only reliable inventory of what your account can do is the one you make while it can still do it.

If you would rather have someone else read an account with you, the free ad account audit is where that starts.