The lead  ·  01

iOS 27 Blocks The Trade Desk’s Ad Serving Domain In Safari. What Publishers Should Check Now

The Trade Desk cannot currently serve ads to Safari users on iOS 27, released 14 September, because Apple added adsrvr.org, the DSP’s core ad request and delivery domain, to its block list.

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The week in one paragraph

This was the week the browser and the AI layer both took demand decisions out of the publisher’s hands, and publishers started measuring their way back in. Apple’s iOS 27 blocked The Trade Desk’s core ad-serving domain in Safari alongside UID2, ID5, LiveRamp, Audigent and Permutive, and AdExchanger then reported that WebKit applies its block list through a remote list, so entries can change without an iOS update; a buy-side companion piece shows what that means for an advertiser whose Safari reach may be smaller than its plan assumes. OpenWeb was declared insolvent by the Tel Aviv District Court over about $20 million owed to Mars Growth Capital, with a lien that reaches the receivables publishers are owed. At AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO, OpenAI said sponsored agents are the future of chat ads and answered the question of what LLMs owe publishers with links and citations, while insurers emerged as ad tech’s next AI auditors and IAB Europe’s study put agentic buying at 38% of respondents against 59% for optimization, with a Google Ad Manager option for bidder-specific floors giving publishers a first way to push back. Underneath it all sat the traffic problem: USA Today’s Google referral share has fallen from over 70% to roughly 40%, its CEO would consider blocking Google’s indexer and scraper, publishers are booking GEO revenue without an agreed scoreboard, more than 300 of them went to Washington for the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, and the SPUR coalition published version 1.0 of an AI content telemetry standard that only Google has so far answered.