Fraud and invalid traffic violations fell to 0.5 percent globally while the share of ads served outside their intended geography rose to 1.2 percent, according to first-quarter figures DoubleVerify recirculated today.

Digital advertisers received a fresh set of quality and attention figures today, when DoubleVerify's publisher newsletter resurfaced the company's Quarterly Benchmarks report for the first quarter of 2026. The document, produced by the New York-based media measurement firm, tracks how advertisements performed across regions, devices, and industry verticals between January and March. It arrives at a moment when marketers are being asked to weigh attention metrics alongside older, blunter measures like viewability, and the numbers inside it move in different directions depending on which metric is examined.

Global authentic viewable rates rose to 74 percent, a three percent improvement compared with the same quarter last year. Fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic violations fell 24 percent year over year to 0.5 percent. Brand suitability violations also declined, dropping nine percent to 4.3 percent. Yet not every indicator moved in a favorable direction: the rate of ads served outside their intended geography climbed 12 percent, landing at 1.2 percent globally, even as most other quality measures improved in parallel.

What the quality benchmarks show

The report separates its findings into two distinct sections. The first, titled Global Quality Benchmarks, focuses on viewability, fraud, and brand suitability. The second, Attention Benchmarks, applies DoubleVerify's proprietary Attention Index to measure how effectively advertisements hold a viewer's focus once they are technically visible on screen.

On the quality side, six headline metrics anchor the report: authentic viewable rate, block rate, fraud and SIVT violation rate, brand suitability violation rate, out of geo violation rate, and video filter rate. Of these, four improved year over year and two moved in the wrong direction. The authentic viewable rate - defined in the report as the percentage of measured ads that had the opportunity to be seen in a brand suitable, fraud-free environment served in the correct geography - reached 74 percent, up three percent from the first quarter of 2025.

Block rate, which measures impressions withheld because they failed to comply with a client's brand suitability or fraud settings, fell eight percent to 3.5 percent. The fraud and SIVT violation rate - covering bot fraud, site fraud, non-human data center traffic, and injected ad events - dropped 24 percent, settling at 0.5 percent globally. Video filter rate, described in the report as the mechanism preventing ads from serving on fraudulent, unsuitable, or out-of-geo inventory across connected TV, mobile, and desktop environments, declined 24 percent to 4.6 percent.

The exception to this pattern of improvement was the out of geo violation rate, which increased 12 percent to 1.2 percent. This metric captures instances where an advertisement was served, or was prevented from being served, outside the geography specified in a brand's targeting settings. Although the absolute figure remains small in percentage terms, the direction of travel runs counter to every other headline metric in the section, and it is the only one of the six that worsened rather than improved.

Regional splits in viewability

Regional breakdowns reveal considerable variation beneath the global averages. North America posted the strongest authentic viewable rate at 76 percent, alongside the lowest fraud and SIVT violation figures relative to its display and video viewability numbers. EMEA followed at 68 percent, LATAM at 75 percent, and APAC trailed the group at 63 percent.

Brand suitability violations followed a similar regional pattern but with a wider spread. North America recorded the lowest violation rate at 3.7 percent, while APAC posted the highest at 8.0 percent - more than double the North American figure. EMEA sat in between at 6.3 percent, and LATAM registered 6.0 percent. Fraud and SIVT violation rates, by contrast, showed less regional divergence: North America and LATAM both recorded 0.5 percent, while APAC and EMEA each came in at 0.4 percent.

Display viewable rates ranged from 64 percent in APAC to 76 percent in North America, with LATAM close behind at 76 percent and EMEA at 70 percent. Video viewable rates showed less spread, clustering between 84 percent (APAC, EMEA, and LATAM, all identical) and 88 percent in North America.

Device performance diverges for display and video

The report also splits viewability by device type, and the pattern differs sharply depending on whether the advertisement is a display or video format. For display advertising, mobile app environments produced the strongest viewable rate at 82 percent, ahead of desktop at 75 percent and mobile web trailing at 65 percent. For video advertising, the order shifts: desktop led at 85 percent, followed by mobile web at 80 percent, with mobile app registering the lowest video viewable rate at 77 percent.

This divergence matters because it means a media buyer cannot apply a single device-preference rule across both formats. A campaign strategy that favors mobile app inventory for its display viewability advantage would be working against the grain on video, where that same environment produces the weakest results of the three device types measured.

Video completion and engagement metrics

Separate from viewability, the report's Global Video Benchmarks section - which explicitly excludes connected TV - measures how much of a video advertisement audiences actually watch, and whether they watch with sound on. The global video completion rate stood at 69 percent, meaning just over two-thirds of measured video ads played through to their end. The audible rate, capturing the share of measurable impressions that had audio turned on for any duration, reached 17 percent. A combined metric called Audible and In-View on Completion Rate, which requires both audibility and at least 50 percent pixel visibility at the moment a video finishes, came in considerably lower at 11 percent globally.

Breaking completion down by quartile and device reveals a familiar decay curve, though the rate of decline differs by platform. Desktop videos started strongest at 88 percent completion through the first quartile and finished at 74 percent by the fourth. Mobile app videos began at 87 percent and dropped to 71 percent. Mobile web began lowest, at 84 percent, and fell furthest, ending at 66 percent by the final quartile - an 18 percentage point decline from start to finish, the steepest drop-off of the three device categories.

Audible rate by device told a different story about where sound-on viewing concentrates. Mobile app led decisively, starting at 46 percent in the first quartile and declining to 37 percent by the fourth. Desktop, by contrast, remained consistently low throughout, moving only from 10 percent to 8 percent across the four quartiles. Mobile web sat closest to desktop, moving from 6 percent down to 5 percent.

Audible and In-View on Completion performance by device and region added a further layer of granularity. Globally, mobile app achieved a 29 percent AVOC rate, far ahead of desktop at 7 percent and mobile web at 4 percent. Regionally, APAC's mobile app AVOC reached 51 percent - the highest figure recorded anywhere in the device and region matrix - while APAC's mobile web AVOC registered just 6 percent, illustrating how dramatically outcomes can differ across device categories within a single region.

Attention scores separate performance from mere visibility

The report's second half addresses a different question entirely: not whether an ad was technically viewable, but whether it actually captured a viewer's attention. DoubleVerify's Authentic Attention framework, described in the document as an MRC-accredited, privacy-friendly solution that does not depend on cookies, aggregates more than 50 data points into an overall Attention Index. That index is built from two component measures - an Exposure Index, which evaluates the ad's presentation through metrics like viewable time and share of screen, and an Engagement Index, which tracks user-initiated interactions such as touches, screen orientation changes, and audio controls occurring while the ad is displayed.

Both component indices are further subdivided. The Exposure Index breaks down into a Prominence Index, measuring viewable pixels relative to total screen space, and an Intensity Index, which for video ads incorporates viewability, audibility, and quartile completion, and for display ads focuses on on-screen viewable time. The Engagement Index similarly splits into a User Presence Index, a binary measure of whether a person was physically present at the device when the ad was viewable, and an Ad Interaction Index, which evaluates whether the user interacted directly with the advertisement itself.

All of these indices are normalized to a baseline of 100, representing the average value across DoubleVerify's measurement ecosystem over a rolling 28-day window. A score of 125, therefore, indicates performance 25 percent above that baseline, while a score below 100 indicates underperformance relative to the average. According to the report, DoubleVerify indexes more than 100 billion impressions each month to build these global attention benchmarks.

Regional attention rankings

EMEA posted the strongest overall Attention Index among the four regions at 110, driven by a particularly high Engagement Index of 116 - the highest engagement figure recorded across any region. APAC followed with an Attention Index of 109, supported by the strongest Exposure Index of the group at 112. LATAM scored 101 overall, while North America posted the lowest regional Attention Index at 99, effectively matching the global baseline rather than exceeding it.

The gap between regions widens further when the underlying sub-indices are examined. APAC's in-depth performance data shows a Prominence Index of 153 - by a wide margin the highest recorded figure in the entire regional breakdown - alongside a comparatively modest Exposure Index component score elsewhere in the matrix. EMEA, meanwhile, recorded an Ad Interaction Index of 139, again the highest such figure among the four regions, reinforcing the pattern that different regions are excelling on different dimensions of attention rather than converging on a single formula.

At the country and channel level, EMEA's desktop display environment produced a score of 125, the single highest figure in the entire in-depth regional performance table. APAC's in-app video placements scored 131, and its desktop video placements reached 130. North America's weakest showing came in mobile web display, which scored just 84, the lowest individual figure recorded anywhere in that detailed breakdown.

Which industries captured the most attention

The report ranks industry verticals by Attention Index, identifying both top and bottom performers. Technology led with a score of 107, tied with Energy and Utilities, also at 107. Retail, Home, and Fashion followed closely at 106. At the opposite end of the ranking, Automotive posted a score of 97, Travel scored 96, and Telecom recorded the lowest score of any vertical in the report at 90.

The 17-point gap separating Telecom from the top-ranked Technology and Energy and Utilities verticals represents the widest spread in the vertical comparison. Because the report does not disclose a prior-quarter telecom figure for direct comparison, it is not possible to say from this document alone whether the sector's position reflects a change from previous periods or a persistent pattern; what the data does establish is where Telecom stands relative to its peers within this specific quarter.

Context: an industry under scrutiny while still publishing methodology

DoubleVerify's benchmark releases do not exist in isolation from the company's broader position in the advertising verification market. The firm has faced a difficult stretch in its public markets history. DoubleVerify was sued by a shareholder in a derivative complaint filed in December 2025, alleging that company executives misled investors about the effectiveness of its bot detection technology between November 2023 and February 2025. A separate class action, filed earlier, made related allegations following a steep single-day stock decline after weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter results in early 2025.

Those legal proceedings concern financial disclosures and investor communications; they are separate from the measurement methodology described in the Quarterly Benchmarks report itself, which follows a format DoubleVerify has used consistently across prior releases. The company's Fraud Lab has continued to publish technical investigations into emerging threats during this same period. DoubleVerify exposed a network called AutoBait in a report published on March 4, 2026, documenting more than 200 domains using large language models and AI image generation to produce clickbait content at industrial scale, an operation the company said had generated tens of millions of advertising impressions. That report was authored by three named DV Fraud Lab researchers and included exposed operational code from the network itself, a level of technical detail that distinguished it from earlier, less granular fraud disclosures.

Connected TV has also featured prominently in the company's recent output, though CTV performance falls outside the scope of the Q1 2026 Quarterly Benchmarks document, which explicitly excludes that channel from its video section. DoubleVerify's 2026 Global Insights report, published May 7, 2026, found that CTV fraud schemes and variants rose 140 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, and separately reported that more than one in three monitored CTV impressions were delivered to screens that were switched off, a finding first detailed in coverage published in March 2026. Those CTV-specific findings sit alongside, rather than inside, the open web, mobile, and desktop figures reported in the Quarterly Benchmarks document covered here.

Why the fraud and geo-targeting split matters for buyers

The gap between an improving fraud rate and a worsening out-of-geo rate is worth sitting with, because the two problems require different fixes. Fraud detection depends on identifying non-human traffic patterns; geo-targeting accuracy depends on correctly reading location signals and applying a brand's stated geography settings before an impression serves. A vendor or platform can be getting steadily better at the first problem while making no progress, or losing ground, on the second. This report's data shows exactly that combination in a single quarter.

The report's broader structure - splitting quality benchmarks from attention benchmarks into two separate halves - reflects a shift already underway in how advertisers evaluate media. Viewability alone answers a narrow question: did the ad have the technical opportunity to be seen? Attention metrics attempt to answer a different one: did anyone actually look at it, and for how long? That distinction has practical consequences for campaign planning. A publisher or platform can post excellent viewability figures while producing mediocre attention scores, and the reverse is equally possible. The device-level data in this report illustrates the point directly. Mobile app environments delivered the best display viewability of any device category at 82 percent, yet the same environment produced the lowest video viewable rate at 77 percent. A media buyer optimizing purely for viewability, without reference to format, could end up allocating budget inconsistently across otherwise similar-looking mobile inventory.

The vertical rankings carry a similar warning against oversimplified conclusions. A 17-point gap between the highest and lowest performing industries is a meaningful spread, but the report offers no explanation of causation - it does not say why Telecom, Travel, and Automotive cluster at the bottom, nor why Technology and Energy and Utilities cluster at the top. Advertisers in lower-scoring verticals may find the figures useful as a benchmark against which to measure their own campaigns, without treating the score itself as a diagnosis of what needs to change.

Timeline

  • Q1 2025 - Baseline comparison period referenced throughout the Q1 2026 report for year-over-year percentage changes.
  • January - March 2026 - Measurement period covered by DoubleVerify's Quarterly Benchmarks report, spanning global quality and attention data across APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America.
  • March 4, 2026 - DoubleVerify's Fraud Lab publishes its AutoBait investigation, a separate but related piece of the company's ongoing measurement and fraud-detection output.
  • May 7, 2026 - DoubleVerify publishes its 2026 Global Insights report on connected TV, documenting a 140 percent rise in CTV fraud schemes, a figure not covered in the Quarterly Benchmarks document since that report excludes CTV.
  • July 7, 2026 - DoubleVerify's publisher newsletter recirculates the Q1 2026 Quarterly Benchmarks report to subscribers, describing it as the company's latest quality and attention data.

Summary

Who: DoubleVerify, a New York-based digital media measurement and advertising verification company, produced the data. Its publisher-facing newsletter recirculated the report to subscribers, including trade media contacts, today.

What: A Quarterly Benchmarks report for the first quarter of 2026, documenting a 24 percent drop in fraud and invalid traffic violations alongside a 12 percent rise in out-of-geo ad violations, plus a separate Attention Benchmarks section measuring how effectively advertisements captured viewer focus across regions, devices, and industry verticals.

When: The report covers advertising activity from January through March 2026. DoubleVerify's newsletter presenting the document to publisher-side contacts was sent today, July 7, 2026.

Where: The data spans four global regions - APAC, EMEA, LATAM, and North America - drawn from DoubleVerify's tag-based measurement of open web advertising, according to the source notation included throughout the report.

Why: The report matters to advertisers and publishers because it shows quality metrics moving in opposite directions within the same quarter, fraud falling while geo-targeting accuracy worsens, and because it distinguishes between whether an ad was technically viewable and whether it actually held a viewer's attention, two questions the data suggests do not always have the same answer.