As part of our goal of aligning more closely with industry standards, we previously announced the sunset of the Authorized Buyers Real-time bidding protocol on February 15th, 2025. After the deprecation period, OpenRTB will be the only supported protocol for Authorized Buyers, Open Bidding, and SDK Bidding. Since the announcement, we have worked closely with migrating partners to provide guidance and technical assistance, as well as an A/B experimentation framework.

We have seen a lot of enthusiasm and progress from many partners migrating to OpenRTB, as well as significant improvements in bidding performance for a number of partners compared to Google RTB integrations. However, to provide additional support and further optimize bidding integrations with the OpenRTB protocol, we have decided to extend the Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding protocol's deprecation period.

The sunset date is now April 30th, 2025. Following this date, bid requests will no longer be sent with the Authorized Buyers Real-time bidding protocol, and the only supported protocol will be OpenRTB.

If you have any questions about how OpenRTB differs from Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding protocol, we recommend that you reference the OpenRTB migration guide. If you have other questions or feedback concerning your migration, feel free to contact us using the Authorized Buyers support forum, or [email protected].

- Mark Saniscalchi, Authorized Buyers Developer Relations

The Google Real-time Bidding protocol is deprecated and will sunset on February 15th, 2025. As previously announced, Google plans to no longer send bid requests to endpoints configured to use that protocol after it is sunset.

Additionally, starting September 1st, the protocol will enter maintenance mode, and stop receiving non-critical feature and quality of service updates. If your real-time bidding integration uses the deprecated Authorized Buyers RTB protocol, Google strongly recommends that you start migrating to either our JSON or Protobuf OpenRTB implementations in order to continue accessing the latest real-time bidding features, and avoid interruptions on the sunset date.

You can use the OpenRTB migration guide as a reference while you work on your migrations.

The OpenRTB protocol uses IAB Content 1.0 taxonomy rather than Google’s product and sensitive category IDs when describing categories blocked by publishers with BidRequest.bcat. You can use the new detectedCategories field in Real-time Bidding API’s creatives resource to find the detected categories for a given creative in IAB’s taxonomy. Google recommends that you use this to reduce bid filtering by only placing bids with creatives having detected categories that aren’t blocked by the publisher. Learn more about changes related to categories.

If you have questions or feedback about how we can ease your migration, please contact us using the Authorized Buyers support forum, or [email protected].

- Mark Saniscalchi, Authorized Buyers Developer Relations

To align more closely with industry practices and embrace OpenRTB as the standard protocol, Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding protocol will sunset February 15th, 2025. Following this date, bid requests will no longer be sent to endpoints configured to use the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol. After this time we will support the OpenRTB protocol only. We strongly recommend that you transition to either the JSON or Protobuf formats of the Authorized Buyers OpenRTB protocol implementation as early as possible to avoid interruptions to your bidding integration.

As a first step in migrating to OpenRTB, we suggest that you read through the OpenRTB migration guide. The guide highlights differences between the Google RTB protocol and the supported OpenRTB formats, identifies how Google RTB protocol fields map to OpenRTB, and provides instructions for complex mappings. We will continue updating our developer content as we approach February 2025 to provide additional guidance, and to ensure a smooth migration.

For any questions or feedback you have concerning the transition to OpenRTB, please contact us using the Authorized Buyers support forum, or [email protected].

- Mark Saniscalchi, Authorized Buyers Developer Relations