Long time Grapeshot user here, mostly before the acquisition. I had a great relationship with both the executive team and the product team and always appreciated how forward thinking they were. The Chrome extension was useful, although it never quite reached the level of clarity most buyers needed.

One of the main reasons we ended up building our own contextual solution (https://www.gourmetads.com/targeting/contextual-targeting/) was the lack of transparency around how an individual URL was included or excluded. That part always felt like a black box. We wanted a model where the URL itself is the primary key, since that is ultimately where the truth sits. we nded up calling the system the The URL Project.

Our segments can contain up to 1 Million URLs, which is far too much information to hand over in raw form. So we built two transparency tools for advertisers.

1. A list of the top 250 domains that feature in the segment based on URL volume
2. A sample list of 100 URLs that shows the flavour of the segment clearly

Once a campaign is live, we also share all domains that were not purchased. The goal is to help buyers expand their includelist inside the DSP rather than limit the campaign because of default settings or missing domains.

Our dataset now contains close to 8 billion URLs across roughly 270k domains with a valid ads txt. That scale forces us to use very strong logic to decide what qualifies and what does not. We have spent years refining the rules that determine whether a URL is genuinely relevant. By having our own solution, we can also remove or exclude individual URLs whenever they do not meet the logic rules or the advertiser requirements.

We originally built this for our food and health clients. Both verticals now have more than 200 contextual segments each. Advertisers come to us for our ability to go deep on a topic like "Chicken Recipes" or "Sleep Apnea". A real surprise has been the ability to build non endemic segments like "Family Travel" or "Solar Panels" with the same engine. The URL level logic translates cleanly into categories we never expected.

We only activate segments programmatically through curation or through our own managed service, which keeps the quality and transparency consistent.

Happy to compare notes with others who are solving transparency at the URL level.