Google Search Ads End Up on Pornographic and Sanctioned Sites

When Apple, Goldman Sachs and other large brands bought Google search ads over the last year, these search ads not only appeared across search queries like “best credit cards,” but also on more unsavory sites, according to research from ad-tech research outfit Adalytics. These websites featured copyrighted and pornographic content, as well as sites for Iranian and Russian corporations sanctioned by the U.S. government. The findings are spurring marketers to reassess their Google Search and Performance Max (Pmax) spend. This is the latest example of the systemic difficulties advertisers face in knowing where their ads run in the convoluted programmatic ecosystem, and particularly within Google’s systems. Previous Adalytics research has found ads appearing in undesirable environments for advertisers, plus opaque reporting for other Google products including Pmax, YouTube's video partner network and YouTube Select. When advertisers buy search ads, they can extend their reach via Search Partner Network (SPN), websites that use Google’s search interface and are eligible for ad monetization. According to Google, websites that violate its policies—which prohibit publishers from monetizing pornography, committing intellectual property offenses and having backing from an entity sanctioned by the U.S. government—are not eligible for inclusion. However, Adalytics found a minority of unsavory websites within the Search Partner Network. The report found more than 36,000 websites in the Google SPN eligible for advertising, 390 of which are pornographic and four of which are websites belonging to entities sanctioned by the U.S. government. Adalytics also found more than 2,200 domains in the SPN that seemed to violate copyright laws. The report found Adweek ads on an Italian porn site. “I vaguely knew that Google allowed websites to embed search widgets on them,” one media buyer told Adweek, who requested anonymity to discuss industry relations and was briefed on the report's findings. “I didn’t know they were serving ads, and I didn’t know they had such a terrible management system that it could be running on the sites listed in the report.” Apple and Goldman Sachs did not respond to comment by press time. Buyers Question Inventory Quality, Transparency on Google’s AI-powered Performance Max Reassessing ad spend Google tells advertisers that their search ads can end up on its SPN, but it doesn’t let brands know which partner websites these ads air on, according to official Google documentation. A Google spokesperson said advertisers can request an SPN report at the network level (not site placements) from their account manager, as well as request from account managers to exclude certain sites. But via Google’s popular AI-driven ad-buying tool Pmax—which advertisers need to opt into—advertisers cannot opt out of the SPN, the media buyer source told Adweek. A second media buyer, who also requested anonymity, said since learning of the report's findings, his company has opted out of the network on its search buys and is exploring pausing spend on Pmax. "The partner network is an easy opt-out checkbox,” said a third media-buying source. "It would be concerning if the sites in the partner network include unsavory and unsafe content, though. Our best practice is to opt out unless there is a specific scale or targeting rationale." The scale of the problem In response, Google said the scale of Adalytics' claims is "wildly exaggerated" and points to inaccuracies in the research outfit's previous two reports. “The examples shared are from our Programmable Search Engine (ProSE) product (a minuscule part of our Search Partner Network), which is a free search tool we offer to small websites so that they can present a search experience directly on their sites," said Dan Taylor, vice president of global ads at Google, in a statement. "Ads may appear based on the user’s specific search query; they are not targeted to, or based on, the website they appear on. Websites that merely implement ProSE do not get any ad revenue from those ads." Publishers that use ProSE may apply to receive a revenue share of the ads displayed on their search results, but must abide by Google's terms of service. However, the examples shared with Google violate the terms of service, spurring Google to disable ProSE on the adult websites, but it wasn't able to share how many by press time. Reputational risks Adalytics observed code that indicates a website is using the Google Search Engine, which would make it part of the SPN and is eligible for advertising. It used data sources like publisher intelligence firm DeepSee.io and publisher crawler archives gathered primarily between October 2022 and October 2023. The risk of a blue-chip advertiser funding these unsavory sites is relatively small. In a separate study of around $1 billion in search media spend from a variety of advertisers, Adalytics found that 5.96% of spend went to the SPN, according to Adalytics founder Krzysztof Franaszek. Still, the risk of a search advertiser appearing on a partner website, and therefore perhaps a pornographic or sanctioned one, is higher: Advertisers only have to pay when a user actually clicks. In fact, 16% of search campaign impressions from the sample of over $1 billion in media spend went to SPN websites, Franaszek said. This article was updated to clarify advertisers can request an SPN report at the network level, not at the site placement level, from Google reps.