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The audience safety gate detects child-directed inventory in the bid request and then checks every bid in the response for creative categories that are inappropriate for that audience. This protects you from COPPA violations and brand safety incidents that arise when adult-oriented or regulated-content creatives reach under-13 inventory.

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Usage

import { createEngine, gates } from "@pecta/core";

const engine = createEngine({
  gates: [
    gates.rtb.tmaxGuard({ bufferMs: 15 }),
    gates.rtb.audienceSafety(),
    // ...
  ],
  timeout: 15,
});

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How child-directed inventory is detected

The gate inspects the request (ctx.input) for any of the following signals:
  • regs.coppa === 1 — the request explicitly declares COPPA applicability
  • app.cat contains IAB13 — the app’s content category is children’s content
  • site.cat contains IAB13 — the site’s content category is children’s content
  • app.bundle contains any of the keywords: kids, child, children, toddler, preschool, baby
If none of these signals are present, the gate returns skipped: true immediately. No bids are inspected and the remaining pipeline continues normally.

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Unsafe categories

When inventory is flagged as child-directed, the gate checks every bid.cat[] entry against the following default unsafe categories:
IAB categoryContent type
IAB7-39Substance abuse
IAB8-5Beer
IAB8-18Wine
IAB14-1Dating
IAB25Non-standard content
IAB25-1 through IAB25-7Non-standard content subtypes
IAB26Illegal content
IAB26-1 through IAB26-4Illegal content subtypes
If any bid carries one of these categories, the gate fails with the offending category name: 
{
  "name": "rtb.audience-safety",
  "passed": false,
  "reason": "child-directed inventory served unsafe category: IAB8-5",
  "latency_ms": 1
}

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Options

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unsafeCategories
string[]
Replace the default unsafe category set entirely. When provided, only the categories you list are considered unsafe. Pass an empty array to effectively disable the category check while keeping the COPPA detection logic.
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extraKidBundleHints
string[]
Additional substrings to match against app.bundle when detecting child-directed inventory. Matched case-insensitively. For example, ["junior", "playground"] would flag bundles like com.example.junior-app.
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name
string
default:"rtb.audience-safety"
Override the gate’s name in evaluation results and telemetry.

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Example: COPPA request with unsafe bid

{
  "regs": { "coppa": 1 },
  "imp": [{ "id": "imp-001", "bidfloor": 0.20 }]
}
A bid response carrying a beer creative category: 
{
  "seatbid": [
    {
      "bid": [
        {
          "id": "bid-1",
          "impid": "imp-001",
          "price": 0.30,
          "cat": ["IAB8-5"]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}
The gate detects regs.coppa = 1, finds IAB8-5 in the bid’s cat array, and fails.
If you override unsafeCategories with your own list, the defaults are completely replaced. Make sure your list covers all content types that are inappropriate for minors under your applicable regulations.
Use extraKidBundleHints to catch proprietary app naming conventions that the default keyword list does not cover. Bundle matching is substring-based, so "jr" would match both com.kids.jr.app and com.junior.games.