despite some skepticism, court mostly allows adtech vendor's disparagement claims against competitor to proceed

Double Verify Holdings, Inc. v. Adalytics Research, LLC, No. 25-1535-TDC, 2026 WL 1133411 (D. Md. Apr. 27, 2026)

DoubleVerify is in the business of “helping brands, agencies, and publishers verify that their digital advertising investments are delivered as intended.” Its customers advertise online and thus seek to ensure maximum viewership by real potential consumers. “Online ads are typically placed on websites through a high-speed, auction-like process.” The auctioneer, a “demand-side platform,” collects “bids” from advertisers; this is the “pre-bid” stage. If an advertiser’s bid is accepted and its ad is displayed, or “served,” to the webpage visitor, the advertiser will be billed for the “impression.”

Online advertisers retain DoubleVerify to avoid having their ads served to bots rather than to humans, and to avoid paying for such impressions if they do occur. DoubleVerify offers two solutions to help customers avoid paying for views resulting from bot activity, aka invalid traffic (IVT): it claims that its pre-bid service successfully filters out 99 percent of GIVT impressions at the pre-bid stage, but it also offers a post-serve service that (1) identifies and removes views resulting from standard bot IVT (GIVT) from the counts of billable views and (2) notifies customers about views resulting from malicious IVT so that they may then seek reimbursement from the publishers. Users can use the pre-bid service, the post-serve service, or both.

Adalytics is an “ ‘ad-tech’ vendor” that “sells an ad transparency service that competes with DoubleVerify” and allegedly carried out a disparagement campaign. Its report quoted DoubleVerify’s claim that it “offers the most comprehensive and accurate pre-bid avoidance targeting available in the market” but didn’t mention DoubleVerify’s post-serve services.

The Report claimed to be the “largest analysis of declared bot traffic in the context of digital advertising.” Relevant claims: (1) “Many publishers which appear to employ the IAS and DoubleVerify publisher optimization tools on their pages were observed serving ads to bots, including to declared bots operating out of known data center IP addresses.” (2) “Hundreds of major brands whose ads’ source code include[s] … code from DoubleVerify appear to have had their ads served to bots in data centers.” (3) Advertisers “whose ads appear to be mediated by DoubleVerify’s Scibids AI technology” were served “to declared bots operating out of known data center IP addresses or to URLScan[’s] bots.”

It concluded that “[i]nterpreting the results of this observational study requires nuance and caution,” and that “[o]ne should not assume that because a given ad tech vendor or vendors transacted a given ad to a bot that those vendors are somehow responsible or ‘at fault’ for the ad being served to a bot.” The Report also cautioned that “[r]eaders should be discerning and careful not to conflate distinct sets of observations or draw inferences about causality, intent, quantitative impact, magnitude, or provenance,” and that it “makes no assertions about” these issues. And it said that it “does not make any recommendations to media buyers with regards to whether or not to transact with specific ad vendors or with specific publishers,” but advised that advertisers “may benefit from undertaking a closer review of their digital advertising.”

DoubleVerify argued that, based on Adalytics’s “willful blindness to post-serve detection and filtration,” the Report “falsely and misleadingly portrays DoubleVerify’s web advertisement verification and fraud protection services as ineffective, including by stating or clearly implying that DoubleVerify’s customers are regularly billed for GIVT impressions.” In addition, references to DoubleVerify in the source code on webpages from which ads were served to bots could have occurred in relation to DoubleVerify customers who did not use its pre-bid services. DoubleVerify alleged that, for all of the ad views, or impressions, cited in the Report that were ostensibly connected to DoubleVerify and that it was able to identify in its records, it confirmed that it had actually detected such impressions at the post-serve stage and either removed them from customers’ billable counts or flagged them for reimbursement.

DoubleVerify alleged additional false or misleading statements or material omissions, including using 115 screenshots of advertisements presented in the Report as having been served by DoubleVerify customers where at least 62 had no apparent connection to DoubleVerify.

DoubleVerify alleged reputational and financial harm from dissemination of these claims, including a WSJ article titled “Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short,” which stated that DoubleVerify “regularly miss[es] nonhuman traffic.” DoubleVerify’s stock price fell, and it allegedly had to expend employee time and resources to counter the Report. It therefore sued for false advertising under the Lanham Act as well as defamation, injurious falsehood, tortious interference with business relations, and unfair competition.

Was this a “commercial advertisement or promotion”? “Although the Report reads more like an analysis of other products and related technology than a communication aimed at selling Adalytics’s own goods or services, DoubleVerify asserts that Adalytics publishes research of this kind because it ‘uses its blog posts and articles to promote its own platform’ and supports that claim by pointing to a February 2025 statement on Adalytics’s website that it ‘release[s] thought leadership on systemic issues affecting brands and their media investments ... to ... attract new clientele.’” And it alleged an economic motivation for publishing: to win new business from customers of DoubleVerify.

Although the Report didn’t promote a specific product, that wasn’t dispositive of whether this was commercial speech. Nor was whether this was a traditional “advertisement.” At this stage, Adalytics’ direct competition and commercial motivation was enough: “the Report could potentially constitute commercial speech where its focus was the dissemination of the results of an analysis critical of a competitor’s product or service.” And allegations about harm to DoubleVerify’s stock price and “inbound calls from its customers regarding the effectiveness of DoubleVerify’s services” adequately alleged that the Report was “sufficiently disseminated to the relevant purchasing public to constitute advertising or promotion within that industry.”

Adalytics claimed that the challenged statements were all protected opinions on scientific and technical matters. The court disagreed (reaching the same result on defamation).

Defamation: most of the challenged statements weren’t alleged to be literally false. For example, the complaint conceded that DoubleVerify’s pre-bid services do not actually prevent all ads from being delivered to bots when it acknowledged that those pre-bid services filter out only “99% of unwanted GIVT impressions.” But defamation by implication was possible. Under governing Maryland law, if “the expressed facts are literally true,” a plaintiff pursuing a defamation-by-implication theory “must make an especially rigorous showing” and may prevail only if the challenged language “affirmatively suggest[s] that the author intends or endorses the inference.”

The court found it significant that the Report stated that “impression level log file data and financial invoices suggested that advertisers were billed by ad tech vendors for ad impressions served to declared bots operating out of known data center server farms.” This was fairly implied to relate to DoubleVerify. Also, the Report plausibly misled when it claimed to be able to identify whether a given brand had been charged for bot avoidance services, even when these impressions could have been served by DoubleVerify customers that do not have pre-bid solutions enabled. The court was a bit skeptical—DoubleVerify didn’t allege that any material number of its customers place online ads without enabling DoubleVerify’s pre-bid solutions—but the case was in an early stage.

Assuming, without deciding, that DoubleVerify had to plead an endorsement of the defamatory implications even though DoubleVerify wasn’t a public official, it was plausible that Adalytics, which “claimed expertise in advertising technology,” would understand that “DoubleVerify’s customers, in accordance with industry standards, would not be charged for pre-bid impressions served to bots once DoubleVerify’s post-serve processes were run.” Also, DoubleVerify’s “pre-emptive article,” published two months before the Report, put Adalytics on notice. And Adalytics allegedly illustrated its intent to disseminate defamatory information because it sent a draft version of the Report to certain media outlets but never requested any comment from DoubleVerify. These allegations were sufficient if not “overly compelling.”

The disclaimer wasn’t sufficient because it didn’t specifically disclaim the allegedly defamatory implication.

Nor was the Report protected opinion. “[A]lthough Adalytics used some technical methods in the Report, it was published on the company’s general website and was not a peer-reviewed scientific or technical journal article such as those at issue in cases cited by Adalytics on this point.”Even assuming that DoubleVerify was a limited-purpose public figure, it alleged sufficient facts for actual malice, noted above.

Injurious falsehood claims also survived.  Expenses incurred when countering the publication of the Report were sufficient to allege special damage. Common-law unfair competition also survived, but tortious interference claims failed because Double Verify didn’t “identify a possible future relationship which is likely to occur, absent the interference, with specificity.”