What is TAG Certified Against Fraud?
TAG Certified Against Fraud is a certification from the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) for ad tech companies, publishers, agencies and advertisers that follow a set of anti-fraud practices, including filtering invalid traffic to MRC standards, using ads.txt and sellers.json, and sharing threat data. It signals a company has committed to TAG's fraud-prevention guidelines and audits.
TAG was founded in 2014 by the ANA, the 4As and the IAB to fight fraud, piracy and malvertising. The TAG Certified Against Fraud programme requires GIVT and SIVT filtering, domain and app threat-list use, and payment ID transparency, among other steps. Companies can self-attest or undergo independent validation.
TAG has published studies claiming that campaigns run through TAG Certified Channels see markedly lower IVT than the broader market; those figures come from TAG-commissioned research. Certification does not guarantee fraud-free supply, but buying through TAG Certified Channels is a common contractual requirement for large advertisers.