AppLovin Ad Review drops user-level journeys for aggregate-only reporting
Reported news
By UA Ledger staff — 2 min read
AppLovin says Ad Review (formerly SafeDK) will no longer expose user-level ad journeys; MAX publishers get aggregate reporting by network, ad unit and creative, with an aggregated SDK for iOS and Android.
AppLovin is removing user-level ad-journey views from Ad Review and moving publishers to aggregate reporting. In a 16 September 2026 post, CEO Adam Foroughi says AppLovin Ad Review (formerly SafeDK, which AppLovin says it acquired in 2019) “now meets” an aggregate-only standard: user-level journey views go away; publishers see reporting by network, ad unit and creative instead. The post does not name a separate later cutover date beyond that present-tense framing.
Scope inside MAX
Ad Review, per AppLovin, runs only on impressions MAX mediates, and only after a publisher turns it on in the MAX dashboard. That is a product control inside mediation, not a store-wide OS change.
AppLovin also states that it does not build user or device profiles from Ad Review data and does not feed that data into Axon or other AppLovin models. Treat those points as the company’s description of its own practice, not an independent audit.
What publishers lose and keep
What goes away is the ability to open a user-level path to a single bad ad. What remains, in AppLovin’s telling, is aggregate reporting by network, ad unit and creative, plus an aggregated Ad Review SDK for iOS and Android. Creative and UA ops that used journey views for crash, redirect or inappropriate-creative triage will need aggregate kill rules instead.
Competitive framing — labelled
The same post argues that rival ad-quality tools should not capture other networks’ user-level served-ad streams, and sketches attribution scenarios if they do. AppLovin does not name those providers. Report that as AppLovin’s stated industry standard and advocacy, not as verified third-party practice.
Operator implication
MAX publishers should confirm dashboard and SDK state after 16 September, rebuild creative QA around network / ad-unit / creative aggregates, and inventory any other ad-quality SDK that still exports user-level served-ad detail. Do not invent a hard sunset calendar date the primary does not publish. A separate creative-ops analysis draft already exists in this run folder; this brief is the measurement news record.