NAV Navbar
Logo

IAB Categories

The Webshrinker categorization service supports the “IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy”, or what used to be called the “Quality Assurance Guidelines (QAG) Taxonomy.” These categories are composed of Tier-1 and Tier-2 level categories with Tier-2 being a sub-level to a parent category.

The IAB categories are an industry standard and are heavily used in services like advertising and Internet security and filtering appliances.

There are 26 tier-1 (top level) categories, 366 tier-2 (sub level) categories, and an additional 12 tier-3 categories that are specific to the Webshrinker category service. The total number of categories are 404.

Additional Categories

As the IAB category taxonomy are heavily geared toward advertising, we have added some additional categories to better support other use cases like Internet filtering and security appliances.

These extra categories are nested under tier-1 but contain “-WS” in the identifier. For example, IAB7-WS1, or “Health & Fitness > Abortion”. These extra categories add granularity and allow you to make better decisions on what to do with the content.

Tier-1 and Tier-2 Categories

These are the supported IAB categories available in the category API.

There are some minor changes to the category name labels as well as a few categories being combined. Any of these changes are indicated with a superscript number (1,2 or 3) next to the category in the following list.

Indicator Description
1 Indicates that the categories label differs slightly from the official IAB label. This was done to clarify categories for some clients as well as for international use.
2 Indicates that the category was combined with another category.
3 IAB12 - This category is a combination of IAB12-1, IAB12-2, and IAB12-3. This change was made to better support international use.
4 These categories are Webshrinker specific and are provided in addition to the standard IAB categories.