I've always taken it that, in relationship to AdSense, Google is our client and we are the supplier. The AdWords advertisers are Google's clients. This is based simply on the money trail -- who pays whom.

In practice, this awareness (a) saved my skin when I was a victim of a sabotage attack and (b) led to a resurrection experience where I graduated from "disabled account" status to Top Contributor (moderator) status on the Google-operated AdSense help forums.

I survived the initial disabling by connecting the dots distinguishing business and personal accounts. I survived the sabotage by immediately focusing on protecting the client (Google) -- and the client's clients -- from harm by denying myself revenue through the process, and then working though a glitch that caused revenue to continue to flow into my account even though I did everything to stop that cash flow. (I won't discuss specifics in public because that may give bad guys ideas--but I think the situation was rare and certainly caused some challenges for Google's engineers.)

Well-run AdSense publishers, i believe, "get it" in distinguishing their relationship with Google as a supplier serving a client. And certainly my experience has shown how providing excellent customer service -- that is, regarding Google as a customer -- has paid off in some valuable relationships and viability. There is some reciprocity and respect in the process but the story here should be what service we can give, rather than what service we should expect.