DoubleVerify v. Adalytics Research — Court Allows Lanham Act False Advertising Claim Over Competitor’s Published Research Report to Proceed

Background

DoubleVerify is a publicly traded ad verification company that helps brands detect invalid traffic (“IVT”)—bot traffic—in their digital advertising. Its system works at two stages: pre-bid filtering (blocking bots before an ad auction completes) and post-serve detection (identifying and removing bot impressions from billable counts after ads are served).

Adalytics Research, a competing ad transparency vendor, published a report in March 2025 entitled “On pre-bid bot detection and filtration—Are ad tech vendors serving US Government and Fortune 500 brands’ digital ads to bots?” The report used data from web crawlers and other public tools to identify instances where ads appeared to be served to bots despite the presence of DoubleVerify’s bot detection code. The Wall Street Journal published a companion article the same day, and DoubleVerify’s stock price subsequently fell.

DoubleVerify’s central allegation is that the Report focused exclusively on pre-bid filtering while deliberately ignoring DoubleVerify’s post-serve detection services, thereby falsely implying that DoubleVerify’s overall bot protection is ineffective and that customers are being billed for bot impressions. DoubleVerify sued for Lanham Act false advertising, defamation, injurious falsehood, tortious interference, and unfair competition.

The Court’s Holding

Judge Chuang granted the motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part, allowing four of five claims to proceed.

Lanham Act false advertising (survives): The most significant legal question was whether Adalytics’s Report constitutes “commercial advertising or promotion” under the Lanham Act. The court applied a three-factor test examining economic motivation, whether the speech promotes a specific product, and whether it resembles an advertisement. Factors two and three weighed against DoubleVerify—the Report does not mention Adalytics’s own products or encourage any purchase. But the court found that DoubleVerify’s allegations of competitive motivation were sufficient at the pleading stage, though it cautioned that DoubleVerify “will need to present evidence” of this motivation to succeed.

Defamation by implication (survives): The court acknowledged that most of the Report’s individual statements are “not literally false”—DoubleVerify itself concedes its pre-bid services do not catch all bot traffic. But the court found that the Report, taken as a whole, creates a false implication that DoubleVerify’s services are ineffective by omitting discussion of post-serve filtering. The court rejected Adalytics’s argument that the Report was protected opinion, finding that publication on a commercial website—rather than in a peer-reviewed journal—weighed against protection.

Tortious interference (dismissed without prejudice): The only count dismissed, because DoubleVerify failed to identify any specific business relationship affected by the Report.

Key Takeaways

• A competitor’s published research report may qualify as “commercial advertising or promotion” under the Lanham Act even when it does not mention the competitor’s own products—competitive motivation alone may suffice at the pleading stage.
• Defamation by implication can succeed where individual statements are literally true but the omission of material context creates a false overall impression—a significant risk for companies that publish critical research about competitors.
• The peer-review distinction matters: the court treated publication on a commercial website differently from publication in a peer-reviewed journal, where prior precedent has afforded greater protection to scientific speech.

Why It Matters

This decision has implications well beyond ad tech. Industry analysts, research firms, short sellers, and companies that publish competitive intelligence reports should take note: research that criticizes a competitor’s products or services may expose the publisher to Lanham Act liability, even if framed as objective analysis. The key factors are whether the publisher competes with the target and whether the report omits material context that distorts the overall impression. While the court allowed these claims to proceed only at the motion-to-dismiss stage, the ruling signals that courts will look through the research framing to examine the competitive dynamics underneath.