Download websites that use DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX)

About DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX)

Advertising technology divides cleanly into tools that buy and tools that sell. DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX) sits on the selling side. Publishers wire it in to expose inventory to programmatic demand, so a detection identifies a site whose business model is attention rather than transactions.

The exchange arrived in 2009 and has since been folded into the wider Google publisher stack, which means a detection today usually marks an ad serving relationship rather than a standalone product choice. As of September 2026 we see it on 88,785 domains, 39,993 of them in United States, with .com carrying much of the total. Programmatic supply concentrates where advertiser spend concentrates, and the map of publishers tends to follow the map of budgets rather than the map of readers.

A publisher selling programmatically has crossed a threshold. Doing it at all requires inventory worth bidding on, a person or an agency handling ad operations, and usually a content operation producing pages fast enough to keep impressions flowing. Advertisers use populations like this as a supply map. Ad tech vendors use them to size publishers who already monetise and could be sold a header bidding wrapper, a consent tool or a yield service. Researchers studying how online content is funded use them to see which categories of site still depend on programmatic revenue and which have moved toward subscriptions or sponsorship.

Detection is inferential. Ad tags are injected dynamically, rotated between partners and often served through wrappers that obscure which exchanges are actually connected, so a single fetch may reveal a subset of a publisher's demand partners, or none at all if the page served no ads to an unfamiliar visitor. Sites that fill inventory only for certain regions are the likeliest to be missed. The count should be read as domains where the integration was observable during a fetch, not as a list of publisher accounts.

A single domain check answers whether one publisher was serving through the exchange at one moment. The export supports structural questions: how programmatic supply distributes across countries and suffixes, which exchanges and consent tools appear together on the same pages, and how the set of monetising publishers changes between snapshots. Publisher populations move quickly, and only a full list captured repeatedly shows which direction they are moving in.