A report by Adalytics claims that Google places ads on third-party sites that severely compromise brand safety.
Brand safety is of the utmost importance for advertisers, who shy away from platforms where their advertising can potentially appear alongside content of a harmful nature. X (formerly Twitter) has been in the eye of the storm in recent days for compromising the brand safety of the brands that advertise on its platform. And now the controversy is also affecting Google, which is allegedly placing ads on its search network on websites with compromising content.
The accusations against Google come from the advertising optimization platform Adalytics, which in the report “Does a lack of transparency create brand safety concerns for search advertisers?” details the alleged misconduct of the Mountain View company in the Google Search Partner Network (GSP).
According to the Adalytics study, numerous advertisers, who believed that their advertising would appear exclusively on Google.com, have been shocked to discover that their advertising was also making its way onto disreputable sites on the Internet giant’s GSP network.
Some of the sites where Google’s GSP network ads are being served host pornography and political content of an extremist nature.
In its report, Adalytics claims that a Fortune 500 company (which it does not disclose by name), one of the world’s largest companies by revenue, discovered that its ads were making their way onto many sites completely unrelated to Google, including the far-right website Breitbart.com (which the advertiser had already banned years ago).
Google denies Adalytics’ allegations in its report.
In addition, ads from companies such as BMW and Uber, which would have also long ago blacklisted Breitbart.com, would have also been displayed on this far-right news site.
One of the main problems that the Adalytics report brings to the surface is that advertisers apparently have no way of exporting details about the specific sites where their ads make their way onto the GSP network.
Advertisers that display ads on Google’s search engine are also automatically included in an additional display advertising network that is monetized by the US multinational and to which third-party sites are attached (including those sites that make use of Google’s custom search widget on their domains).
Dan Taylor, Google’s Vice President Global Ads, has denied the accusations made by Adalytics against the company in a post published on the social network X. According to Taylor, the examples cited by Adalytics in its report are invalid and are part of the Programmable Search Engine (ProSE) product, a free search tool for small websites. Taylor emphasizes that the ads in ProSE are not thematically matched to the sites where they break through and that the sites in question do not receive any revenue from such ads either.
We’ll review the report Adalytics published today, but our analysis of the sites and limited information already shared with us did not identify ad revenue being shared with a single sanctioned entity. 2/
— Dan Taylor (@edantaylor) November 28, 2023In addition, Taylor accuses Adalytics of having previously published wholly inaccurate research that provides a deliberately false picture of Google’s products.
