The Debate Over Full URL-Level Campaign Reporting

High-profile incidents have shaken advertisers’ confidence in existing brand safety measures. A “bombshell” report in early 2025 revealed that ads from dozens of major brands were found on websites hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), despite those sites ostensibly being off-limits. This revelation underscored a glaring transparency gap – advertisers discovered they often don’t know which specific webpages their ads appear on, only the top-level domains​. In other words, a brand might be told their ad ran on ExampleSite.com but not that it was on ExampleSite.com/explicit-content-page.

Such lack of granularity makes it hard for advertisers to assess if their ads may have funded or appeared alongside harmful content. As the Adalytics research firm noted, most ad tech vendors “do not provide advertisers with page-URL-level reporting”, limiting brands’ ability to investigate problematic placements​

This has spurred a chorus of marketers demanding full URL disclosure for their programmatic buys. According to Adalytics, “several Fortune 500 advertisers” have already told their ad platforms and verification partners that they will be expecting the full page URLs of where their ads ran​. Industry veterans echo this sentiment: “I don’t think it’s acceptable for any advertiser to not know where their ads are running, period,” argues Robert Leathern, a former Google ad executive.

Beyond the advertisers themselves, regulators and industry watchdogs are adding pressure. U.S. lawmakers, alarmed by the CSAM findings, sent letters to major ad tech companies (including Google, Amazon, and verification firms) “berating them” for allowing ads on such content​. Notably, all six letters explicitly raised the issue of URL-level transparency, pressing these companies on their plans to provide more detailed reporting​. In short, brands (and even government officials) now see full URL transparency as a necessary step to ensure ads don’t unintentionally bankroll bad actors or tarnish a brand’s reputation.

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How Major DSPs Are Responding

The call for transparency has put demand-side platforms under the microscope. Different DSPs are taking different approaches in response to advertiser outcry:

• Amazon Ads (AAP) – Amazon’s DSP, which was implicated in the CSAM incident, is rolling out page-level reporting to advertisers. The company plans to expose full URL placement data through its Traffic Events API, augmenting the domain-level inventory reports it already provided​. Amazon is positioning this as a brand safety improvement, giving clients a deeper look at where their ads served. (Amazon also took the immediate step of issuing refunds to advertisers whose campaigns unintentionally ran on the offending sites​. An Amazon Ads spokesperson confirmed the new transparency features and reiterated that Amazon “already provides site-level (domain-level) transparency” in its standard reports​. In other words, Amazon is now going beyond just the domain to show the specific page URL for open-web impressions – a direct answer to advertisers’ demands.
  
  
• Google Display & Video 360 (DV360) – Google’s DSP (another platform cited in the Adalytics report) has been more circumspect. So far, Google has not announced any change to provide routine URL-level campaign reporting​. The company’s public response to the controversy has been to demonetize the specific sites flagged in the report and to refund affected advertisers​. But when it comes to increasing the granularity of DV360’s reporting, Google has remained non-committal​. (It’s worth noting Google’s entire ad business is under antitrust scrutiny at the moment, which may make new feature rollouts delicate​. Lawmakers have directly asked Google if it will provide full URLs to advertisers​, but as of now Google hasn’t publicly confirmed plans to do so. This cautious stance leaves advertisers watching Google closely for any sign of a shift toward greater transparency.
  
  
• The Trade Desk (TTD) – The independent DSP giant was not directly implicated in the Adalytics CSAM findings, but it has still been swept into the conversation​. There was industry chatter that The Trade Desk might follow Amazon’s lead by enabling page-level URL logs via a macro in its ad tags​. However, the company has publicly poured cold water on that idea. “We are not planning on building URL-level reporting,” a Trade Desk spokesperson told Digiday when asked directly​. That said, TTD isn’t blind to the transparency trend – it already offers advanced advertisers a product called Raw Event Data Stream (REDS), which captures log-level data (including full page URLs) for every ad impression​. In theory, a TTD client can access URL info through REDS, but doing so requires significant technical resources that most advertisers don’t have on hand​. In practice, TTD appears skeptical that every buyer truly needs or can utilize flood-of-data reporting on every URL. The platform is focusing on bespoke log-level data for the few who can leverage it, rather than making full URL reporting a default for all.
  
  
• Other DSPs and Ad Platforms – Many other players in the ecosystem are watching and weighing their options. Verification vendors like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, which work alongside DSPs, have taken note and made their own moves. DoubleVerify announced it is expanding access to URL-level data for all its clients, moving from on-demand availability to a self-service dashboard and integrations that make page-level insights more accessible​. Rival IAS noted it has offered full URL reporting by default since 2021 for any placement deemed unsafe by its system​
  digiday.com. On the DSP side, others (Xandr, Quantcast, etc.) have not made splashy announcements, but industry momentum suggests full-path transparency may become a new norm. The initial focus is on open-web display and video ads (where a “URL” makes sense), whereas walled gardens like social media or CTV have their own transparency challenges beyond this debate.
  
  

Challenges and Limitations of URL-Level Reporting

On the surface, getting a report of every URL where an ad ran sounds like a win for advertisers. But in practice, URL-level reporting comes with significant challenges and limitations:

• Data Overload and Usability: A single campaign can generate thousands (or even millions) of distinct page URLs in reports. Sifting through this deluge of data is non-trivial for advertising teams. One in-house buyer noted that even existing site-level reports often “don’t resolve” into human-readable form, making them of limited use​. At the URL level, the volume and complexity of data increases exponentially. Without specialized tools or expertise, marketers may find themselves unable to make sense of the raw URL lists, let alone derive actionable insights.
  
  
• Resource Intensive to Analyze: Having the URLs is just the first step – figuring out which of those pages were truly brand-safe or not requires serious effort. “Only a select few people who want full URL data have the resources and expertise to do anything with it,” explains Rocky Moss, CEO of DeepSee, which helps advertisers assess content suitability​. Moss notes that an advertiser would need to deploy huge numbers of web crawlers and human analysts to check each page and flag problematic content​. In his words, “it’s not like URL-level reporting is made available, and then everything is okay from that point on” – there is “a huge amount of legwork” required after getting the data​. Smaller brands and agencies may simply lack the bandwidth to operationalize full URL transparency.
  
  
• Partial Supply Chain Visibility: A technical limitation is that not every ad impression even carries a full URL in the bid request or reporting chain. Many publishers and supply-side platforms historically share only the domain name (or app name) to protect user privacy or their data. As some media buyers point out, “it’s up to the supply side to offer full-path URL reporting” in the first place​. If exchanges or publishers don’t pass the exact page URL along, a DSP cannot magically produce it. This is especially true in environments like mobile apps or connected TV where “URL” isn’t applicable. Thus, URL-level reporting might be inherently limited by what inventory providers are willing to disclose. Advertisers could end up with gaps in transparency unless the entire supply chain participates.
  
  
• Publisher Concerns and Privacy: There’s also industry reluctance on the publisher side. Some premium publishers worry that sharing full URLs (which may include article titles or keywords) could expose sensitive editorial data or enable advertisers to target audiences without paying for premium context. While brand safety is the primary rationale for URL transparency, there’s a tension with publisher data policies. Additionally, if a URL contains user identifiers or search query strings, there could be privacy considerations in certain jurisdictions. These factors might limit how broadly full URL data can be shared or utilized.
  
  
• Reactive vs. Proactive Safety: Perhaps the biggest limitation is that URL reporting is inherently retrospective – you learn about a bad placement after your ad has already run there. By the time a risky page shows up in a report, the damage (to brand reputation or consumer exposure) may have occurred. Brand safety advocates note that preventing ads from ever appearing on unsafe pages is the ideal, rather than simply reporting it after the fact. In other words, URL-level transparency on its own is a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. It’s valuable for accountability and learning, but it doesn’t replace the need to block unsafe placements in real time.
  
  

In summary, full URL visibility is not a simple cure-all. It generates a trove of information, but making that information actionable is challenging due to data scale, resource needs, and supply chain constraints. Advertisers must weigh whether they have the tools to effectively use URL-level data, and recognize that it addresses symptoms (lack of transparency) more than the root cause (ads ending up on bad sites in the first place).

Is URL-Level Reporting the Right Answer?

With passionate arguments on each side, the question remains: Is full URL-level reporting truly the silver bullet for brand safety? The answer, according to most in the industry, is nuanced.

On one hand, URL transparency is a critical step forward. It’s hard to argue against more knowledge of where ads run. Armed with page-level details, advertisers can verify that their campaigns aligned with their standards and take action if not. The practice adds a layer of accountability that was missing when advertisers only got high-level domain reports​.

 It can also deter bad actors. If shady websites know that ads will be traced back to the exact page, they may find it harder to fly under the radar. Many observers feel that without such transparency, claims of “brand-safe buying” ring hollow. In this view, not providing URL data seems outdated and opaque, especially when major brands’ reputations are on the line. As one marketer put it bluntly, anything less than full visibility means “the answer seems to be ‘no’,” they’re not doing all they claim to protect brands.

On the other hand, URL-level reporting alone is far from a panacea. The Trade Desk’s reluctance to productize it for all clients is telling – they believe only a few power-users would genuinely benefit from such granular data, and they worry about the noise it introduces​. Many brand safety professionals caution that chasing raw URLs can create a false sense of security or divert focus from proactive solutions.

If advertisers become overly reliant on logs and refunds after-the-fact, they might be less invested in the harder work of improving vetting processes and quality controls upfront. Moreover, as discussed, not every advertiser has the means to do something meaningful with a 10,000-line URL report. There’s a real risk of data overload and analysis paralysis. As Rocky Moss pointed out, “URL-level reporting [becoming] available” doesn’t magically solve brand safety; a huge operational effort must follow to make that data actionable​.

It shines a light on the supply chain like never before, which is undeniably positive for the industry’s health. But the consensus is that it should be paired with better preventative measures. In fact, the ideal scenario is that your pre-bid brand safety tools are so effective that your post-campaign URL report is boring, showing nothing worse than perhaps a few URLs you might manually categorize differently.

So, is URL-level reporting the “right” answer? It’s part of the answer. It delivers transparency that advertisers rightfully deserve, especially in an era of programmatic complexity. However, it’s not a standalone solution. As one programmatic lead quipped, “Even just one impression [on an unsafe page] is too much… Part of fixing the problem is admitting there’s a problem”​

See What’s Missing from URL Reports—Get the Sample Report

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Full URL-level reporting only tells part of the story. Even with a complete list of URLs, advertisers still face major challenges:

• Content changes constantly. What was on the page when your ad was served?
• Manual review isn't practical. Who has time to analyze thousands of URLs?
• Context is everything. Does the page actually align with your brand's values and safety standards?

Qortex goes beyond URL reports by analyzing real-time video and page content using transcription, sentiment analysis, and object recognition. This ensures you have the data to make ads appear in the right content, not just on the right domains.

See the difference for yourself. Get a real sample report and learn how a more advanced approach improves transparency, brand safety, and ad performance.