TAG certification

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is an advertising industry programme that certifies companies against shared anti-crime standards. Its best-known seal, Certified Against Fraud, was launched in 2016. TAG says the central requirement is that all of a company's monetisable transactions are filtered for invalid traffic by a qualified third party. The programme is open to advertisers, agencies, publishers, supply-side platforms and other participants, and publishers can meet the filtering requirement by working with a certified platform.

Where the MRC accredits measurement, TAG certifies the behaviour of the companies doing the buying and selling. The two fit together.

In search arbitrage TAG seals are mostly seen on the larger companies around the trade: native networks, exchanges, verification vendors and some feed providers. For an arbitrageur choosing a traffic source or partner, a current seal is one useful sign of process, alongside the far more important evidence of how the traffic actually performs.

A seal is not a guarantee. Certification shows that controls exist, not that every click is clean. It should be read like ads.txt: a sensible minimum, not proof of quality.

Think of it like this

It is like a builder's trade-association badge. It shows they signed up to a code and passed a check, which is reassuring, but you still inspect the work.