BidSwitch today opened an opt-in layer of bidstream analysis to the supply-side platforms connected to its exchange, supplied by Adalytics Research, the firm whose 2025 bot-detection findings preceded a securities class action against DoubleVerify and a defamation suit filed by that company against Adalytics.

In short

BidSwitch, an exchange owned by Criteo, has struck a data-sharing deal with the research firm Adalytics. Supply partners who opt in will get analysis of their own inventory quality, free of charge, sitting on top of the malware and invalid-traffic filters BidSwitch already runs. If you sell inventory through BidSwitch, nothing changes unless you ask for it, and the company has not said when the analysis becomes available or what it will measure.

What the agreement covers

The arrangement was disclosed from New York and dated September 9, 2026. According to BidSwitch, the company entered a data sharing and research partnership with Adalytics Research to offer specialized bidstream data analytics to its supply partners on an opt-in basis, drawing on Adalytics research capabilities to assess inventory quality.

Three mechanics are described. Adalytics analyses trading activity and alerts clients to behaviour that merits additional review. BidSwitch then conducts what the company calls independent review and adjudication of that research. Partners who opt in receive recommendations they can use to triage potential media issues.

That middle step carries most of the operational weight. Adalytics produces findings; BidSwitch decides which findings reach a partner and in what form. The exchange is therefore both the distributor of the research and its first reader, a position no press release language resolves.

Barry Adams, General Manager at BidSwitch, framed the addition in terms of existing protections. "This adds an opt-in layer of analysis that complements the malware and IVT protections already available on the BidSwitch platform, and we're proud to offer it at no cost," Adams said. He described the deal as giving supply partners another tool to help strengthen media quality.

Krzysztof Franaszek, Founder of Adalytics, framed it as a supply-chain intervention. "Bidswitch is an important stakeholder in the global digital advertising supply chain. By exchanging data and research insights, we aim to strengthen transparency, accountability, and media quality across the digital advertising ecosystem," Franaszek said.

No financial terms were disclosed. No launch date, market scope, or partner count for the opt-in programme was given. The announcement identifies neither the metrics the analysis will produce nor the thresholds that would trigger an alert.

Where the layer sits

The distinction Adams draws matters technically. Malware scanning and invalid traffic filtration are automated gates applied to requests and creatives at scale, generally in real time or shortly after the fact. What Adalytics produces is research: manual and semi-automated investigation of specific patterns across large traffic samples, published as reports rather than returned as a filtering decision inside an auction.

Those two things fail differently. Filters catch what they are configured to catch and miss what they are not. Research finds the thing nobody configured a filter for, and finds it slowly, after the money has moved.

That gap has been measured. On July 28, 2026, TAG, the Association of National Advertisers and Fiducia published analysis finding AI-generated inventory graded premium more than 70% of the time, with a lower invalid traffic rate than clean supply at 0.05% against 0.32%, higher viewability at 77.2% against 74.9%, and a higher clearing price at $7.08 TrueCPM against $6.15. Inventory built for arbitrage does not look cheap or dirty in the standard signal set. It looks better than the real thing.

An exchange adding a research layer on top of its filters is, in effect, conceding that the filters do not settle the question.

Adalytics is an unusual partner for an exchange

Adalytics built its reputation adversarially. A November 2023 report accused Google of placing search advertisements on non-Google sites through the Search Partner Network, including pages carrying pornographic, sanctioned and pirated material. Google denied the findings.

The March 28, 2025 report was heavier. Adalytics analysed more than a petabyte of web traffic across in excess of two million websites over seven years, concluding that leading verification systems routinely failed to block advertisements served to bots that declared themselves as bots, operating from known data-centre addresses. DoubleVerify called the report misleading and manufactured. Integral Ad Science said it continuously evaluated its offerings. HUMAN Security declined to comment, saying it had not seen the full report.

What followed is now part of the sector's financial record. The Electrical Workers Pension Fund filed a securities class action against DoubleVerify on May 22, 2025, after the stock fell 36% in a single session and slid from peaks above $39 to $13.90 by February 28, 2025. Senator Mark Warner contacted the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. A shareholder derivative complaint arrived on December 9, 2025, naming chief executive Mark Zagorski, chief financial officer Nicola Allais and eight directors. DoubleVerify sued Adalytics over the report. Nielsen agreed to acquire DoubleVerify on August 6, 2026 for approximately $2.15 billion at $13.60 per share, a 30% premium to the 60-day volume weighted average.

Adalytics has also pointed its research at intermediaries in Criteo's own category. Reports published in 2024 observed advertisements transacted on sites meeting made-for-advertising definitions used by the ANA and Jounce Media through Google, Magnite, OpenX, PubMatic, Index Exchange, TripleLift and Criteo. More recently, an Adalytics study reported by AdExchanger on May 26, 2026 documented pirated sports livestreams delivering high-profile events to hundreds of thousands of devices outside Nielsen and Nielsen-equivalent measurement, distorting the ratings against which premium television inventory is priced.

Adalytics methodology is not universally accepted, and the firm has been criticised from inside the fraud-research community. Shailin Dhar, reviewing Adalytics work on Direct Digital Holdings' Colossus SSP, questioned the sample size, the absence of peer review and the feasibility of the claims, and argued that ad fraud is better treated as a counterfeiting problem than a cybersecurity one.

Against that record, an exchange voluntarily inviting Adalytics to examine the inventory flowing through it is a departure from how the research firm has usually arrived.

The connectivity layer being examined

BidSwitch was founded in 2012 inside IPONWEB and functions as a routing layer rather than a seller of inventory in its own name. According to the company, it connects more than 200 demand-side and supply-side platforms and provides services related to traffic shaping and optimisation. Barry Adams has run it as General Manager since his appointment in 2018, reporting at the time to IPONWEB co-founder Boris Mouzykantskii, with a stated remit that already included fraud and traffic quality.

The partner figure in the release invites a comparison. When Criteo entered exclusive negotiations to buy IPONWEB for $380 million in December 2021, $305 million in cash and $75 million in treasury shares, the company said BidSwitch was connected to 130 demand partners and close to 150 supply partners. Today's release states over 200 platforms across both sides. The two counts may rest on different definitions of a connected partner, and BidSwitch has not published a reconciliation, which leaves the figures short of a like-for-like trend.

The routing role has been contested by the largest buyer in the market. In August 2024, Display & Video 360 migrated entities targeting inventory through the BidSwitch sub-exchange to direct integrations with Kargo, Media.net, Sharethrough, Nexxen and Yieldmo, removing a set of paths that had previously run through the connectivity layer. Where BidSwitch remains visible in buy-side data is identity: DataBeat measurements covering January 2026 put BidSwitch identity signals at a 42% CPM uplift, against 94% for Unified ID 2.0, with the report attributing the moderate figure to BidSwitch passing identity across the supply path rather than creating it.

An intermediary in that position has a specific exposure. It does not own the inventory, so it cannot be blamed for what is on the page, but every hop through it is a hop a buyer running supply-path analysis may decide to cut.

Criteo's year

The parent company reached this announcement in the middle of a restructuring. Criteo trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CRTO, though the release renders the identifier as NASDAQ: Criteo. Second-quarter 2026 revenue fell 11% to $428 million and full-year guidance was cut, with Contribution ex-TAC guided down as much as 12% for the year. First-quarter revenue had already fallen 6% to $424.6 million with net income down 79% to $8.6 million, even as activated media spend crossed $1 billion in a quarter for the first time.

The corporate structure moved in parallel. Criteo completed its transfer of legal domicile from France to Luxembourg on July 29, 2026, terminated its American Depositary Share programme, and had its board approve a further transfer to the United States expected to complete in January 2027. Three weeks earlier, Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital submitted an offer at a premium above 50%, sending shares up 21.4% to $23.17 on July 6, 2026 and valuing the company near $1.16 billion. That approach has not been resolved publicly.

Regulatory exposure also sits on the record. In March 2026, France's Conseil d'Etat upheld the CNIL's EUR 40 million GDPR penalty against Criteo across every contested ground, covering violations of Articles 7, 12, 13, 15, 17 and 26.

None of that is addressed by the Adalytics agreement, and none of it is altered by it. It does establish the commercial weather in which a subsidiary is offering a free quality service to the partners it depends on for supply.

What the announcement leaves open

Four gaps stand out.

Scope is undefined. The release does not say whether the analysis covers display, video, connected television, mobile application inventory or all of them, nor whether it applies to open-auction traffic, deals, or both.

Adjudication is undefined. BidSwitch says it will independently review and adjudicate Adalytics research before passing recommendations on. No criteria are published for that review, and no appeal path is described for a supply partner that disputes a finding.

Consequence is undefined. Nothing in the announcement indicates that a partner flagged by the analysis faces any change in its access to demand, its fees or its standing on the platform. The output is described as recommendations, which is a softer instrument than the blocklists and exclusion controls used elsewhere in the quality market.

Reciprocity is undefined. The programme covers supply partners. Nothing states that the demand-side platformsconnected to BidSwitch will see the same research about the paths they are buying through, which is where the buy-side value of such analysis would sit.

Why it matters

The commercial framing is what makes this notable rather than routine. Verification is sold as a subscription: FouAnalytics priced unlimited coverage at a flat $2 million a year on August 6, 2026, and the impression-fee model it was challenging remains the norm across DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. BidSwitch is placing a research product on the opposite side of that market and charging nothing for it, which locates the value in supply retention rather than in the analysis itself.

The structural question follows from that. An exchange earns from volume routed through it. A media quality review of that volume, commissioned and adjudicated by the same exchange, sits in tension with the incentive, whatever the good faith of the parties. It is the same objection independent auditors have raised for years against platform-graded brand safety, and it does not disappear because the auditor in this case has a record of embarrassing large companies.

The sector context sharpens both points. The ANA's transparency work found made-for-advertising sites absorbing roughly 21% of programmatic impressions and 15% of spend, and its 2025 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, cited in IAB Spain's supply-side platform guide, found only 41% of programmatic investment reaching genuine, measurable, viewable impressions, with 26.1% consumed by platform fees and data costs. Integral Ad Science automated supply path optimisation in January 2026 precisely because buyers were cutting paths by hand. Sell-side intermediaries have every reason to demonstrate that their own path is worth keeping.

For media buyers, the immediate effect is nil: the programme is opt-in, sell-side, and undated. The signal is longer term. If independent research becomes a service exchanges provide to their own supply, the number of parties with a commercial interest in what that research concludes goes up, and the quantity of published, adversarial audit work available to buyers does not automatically go up with it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: BidSwitch, the exchange and connectivity layer owned by Criteo, and Adalytics Research, the independent firm founded by Krzysztof Franaszek. Barry Adams, General Manager at BidSwitch, and Franaszek supplied the on-record statements. The affected parties are the supply-side platforms connected to BidSwitch and, indirectly, the buyers routing spend through it.

What: A data sharing and research partnership under which Adalytics supplies specialized bidstream data analytics on inventory quality to BidSwitch supply partners on an opt-in basis, at no cost. Adalytics flags activity meriting review, BidSwitch reviews and adjudicates the research, and opted-in partners receive recommendations for triaging potential media issues. The layer sits on top of existing malware and invalid traffic protections.

When: Disclosed September 9, 2026. No availability date, phasing or market sequence was published.

Where: The announcement was issued from New York. BidSwitch operates as a connectivity layer between more than 200 demand-side and supply-side platforms globally. Criteo completed its move of legal domicile to Luxembourg on July 29, 2026 and trades on Nasdaq.

Why: Automated filters have proven poor at separating arbitrage inventory from legitimate supply, with AI-generated inventory graded premium more than 70% of the time in July 2026 analysis by TAG, the ANA and Fiducia. Research-led auditing addresses a category of problem that pre-bid filtering does not. The commercial logic runs the other way as well: an intermediary whose paths buyers can cut has an interest in demonstrating the quality of what it routes, and the same interest complicates the independence of a review it commissions and adjudicates.