• by Wendy Davis , October 10, 2025

DoubleVerify is urging a federal judge to allow it to proceed with a defamation and false advertising lawsuit against analytics company Adalytics over its March report regarding invalid traffic.

In papers filed this week, DoubleVerify argues that its allegations against Adalytics, if taken as true, would "establish the reasonable inference" that Adalytics is liable for the claims in the suit.

The dispute between DoubleVerify and Adalytics centers on the Adalytics report "On pre-bid bot detection and filtration -- Are ad tech vendors serving US Government and Fortune 500 brands’ digital ads to bots?"

Adalytics wrote that its research "suggested that advertisers were billed by ad tech vendors for ad impressions served to declared bots operating out of known data center server farms."

The report mentioned several ad verification companies, including DoubleVerify.

DoubleVerify countered in a rebuttal that the Adalytics report was "inaccurate and misleading," adding that it was "based on the incorrect premise" that advertisers pay for invalid traffic.

DoubleVerify also said that if invalid traffic isn't filtered out pre-bid, it's removed post-bid from the billable impressions shared with advertisers.

Subsequent to the Adalytics report's publication, the Media Ratings Council said in a separate rebuttal that Adalytics focused on pre-bid detection and filtration, but the industry standard relies on a back-end process that filters invalid traffic after ads are served.

DoubleVerify sued Adalytics in May, alleging that statements in its report "falsely assert and imply that DoubleVerify’s services are ineffective and that DoubleVerify’s customers routinely pay for advertising impressions that are served to robotic agents ('bots'), referred to as invalid traffic ('IVT'), rather than to genuine human consumers."

DoubleVerify added that Analytics' statement regarding advertisers being billed for impressions served to bots "appears to be based on Adalytics’ willful blindness to post-serve detection and filtration."

Last month, Adalytics urged U.S. District Court Judge Theodore Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland to dismiss DoubleVerify's complaint for several reasons.

Among others, Adalytics argued DoubleVerify's allegations, even if proven true, would not establish its defamation or false advertising claims.

"As the title indicates, the report focused only on 'pre-bid' (not 'post-bid') services offered by various ad-tech vendors," Adalytics wrote.

The analytics firm added that the report "does not assess the overall 'effectiveness' of any service or vendor," and "never states or implies that DoubleVerify customers were actually billed for specific ads that appear to have been served on bots."

But DoubleVerify writes in its new motion that Adalytics omitted a "core fact" from its report -- that "DoubleVerify’s systems filter bot traffic downstream via 'post-serve' solutions, consistent with industry guidelines published by the Media Ratings Council."

DoubleVerify adds: "Excluding that information made the article intentionally factually incorrect."

Adalytics also argued the lawsuit is "antithetical to the First Amendment, which encourages more speech, not less, on important topics of public concern."

DoubleVerify counters in its new motion that Adalytics' "falsehoods" included verifiable facts, not opinion.

"Adalytics also published those falsehoods on a commercial website where it promotes its competing products, not a peer-reviewed academic journal," DoubleVerify writes.

Adalytics has until October 22 to respond to DoubleVerify's argument.