On July 14, 2026, the Tenth Circuit decided KetoNatural Pet Foods v. Hill's Pet Nutrition, and for about four weeks almost nobody outside pet food and false-advertising practice noticed. Then the analysis arrived. Venable's advertising law team published its read on August 11, Law360 followed on August 19, and by the end of the month the ruling was circulating on media-buying teams' Slack channels under the same subject line: the two-click rule is gone. The court held that a company's own commercial speech can include third-party content it intentionally incorporates through hyperlinks and curated references. In plain terms, a claim you link to can now be treated as a claim you made. That sentence relocates the edge of an ad. It used to end at the landing page. It now extends to whatever the landing page points at.
What the two-click rule was, and what replaced it
The two-click rule was never a statute. It was an informal assumption, comfortable and widely shared, that a firm was not liable for claims living on a separate website a consumer had to navigate to on their own. Your ad made its promise, your page made its case, and if a link on that page led somewhere that said more than you would dare say yourself, that was somebody else's speech. One click was yours. Two clicks was theirs.
The Tenth Circuit rejected that. When a company intentionally incorporates outside content, by linking to it, quoting it, curating it, or steering the reader toward it as support for what the company is selling, that content can be read as the company's own commercial speech. Venable's analysis is blunt about the reach: this is not confined to competitor lawsuits. The same logic is available to the FTC, the FDA, and state consumer-protection enforcers, all of whom care a great deal about substantiation and very little about how many clicks separate the claim from the checkout. None of this is legal advice, and how far other circuits follow is an open question. But the direction is set, and it points outward.
The perimeter of an ad just moved outward
Picture the click-through chain for an ordinary performance campaign. The ad makes a promise. The landing page restates it and adds proof: a clinical study, a comparison chart, a review widget pulling in third-party ratings, a partner page hosting the detailed spec sheet, a link to the press coverage that said the flattering thing you would not say yourself. Every one of those links was placed deliberately, because it helped the page convert. Under the two-click assumption, that was smart merchandising. After KetoNatural, each one is a candidate for being your claim.
This changes what ad-to-page congruence is for. We have always argued that the ad and the page should tell one story because mismatch costs conversions, and it does. But congruence has now acquired a second function. If the ad says one thing, the page says something slightly stronger, and a linked study says something stronger still, the chain is no longer a performance problem with a legal footnote. It is a liability boundary, and the weakest link in it defines your exposure. The governance gap, the distance between what your systems publish and what you can actually vouch for, just grew a new dimension: not only what the page says, but what it vouches for by pointing.
There is a pattern here that connects to the other control shifts this month. Meta is removing the ability to decide where your ad appears, so the page has to carry the promise regardless of placement. The court is now saying the page also carries responsibility for what lies behind it. Platforms decide context. Advertisers inherit accountability. Both trends leave the same residue: the landing page and everything it endorses is the part of the journey you own, in every sense of the word.
A cautious prediction for the next 6 to 12 months
We'll hedge where hedging is honest, because one circuit's ruling is not the law everywhere yet. But the shape of the coming year seems reasonably clear.
First, legal review will expand from the creative to the click-through chain. Today, compliance teams approve ad copy and, in regulated categories, the landing page. Very few review the outbound links on that page against the ad's claims. We expect that to become a standard step, and the teams that do it well will do it with an inventory rather than a spot check, because a page's outbound links change more often than its headline.
Second, substantiation hygiene will become a real line item. Review widgets, embedded third-party ratings, partner pages and press links will get the same scrutiny as a superlative in a headline. Some links will be removed. More will be kept but reconciled, so that the third-party claim and the ad's promise say the same thing at the same strength.
Third, the likely mistake. Teams will audit the ad, feel compliant, and never open the page's links. That is the two-click reflex surviving the death of the two-click rule, and it is exactly where the exposure now sits.
Fourth, and quieter: the same discipline that reduces legal risk protects conversion. A visitor who reads a bold claim in the ad, a softer one on the page, and a contradictory one in the linked review registers the dissonance even if they never articulate it. Trust is the currency of the post-click experience, and a chain that changes its story spends that trust for nothing. The teams treating this purely as a legal problem will miss that they are also fixing their conversion rate.
Governance as legal defense
What does a defensible record look like? It looks like the same loop we would run for performance, with one added step. Inventory every ad and the page it points to. Score the pair for message match, so you know whether the page delivers the ad's specific promise and at what strength. Then capture what the page links to and check that those claims tell the same story, no stronger and no weaker than what the ad said. Finally, monitor for alignment drift, because ads get refreshed weekly, pages quarterly, and outbound links whenever a partner changes a URL.
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. After KetoNatural, the unexamined campaign is not merely unoptimized. It is undefended. Knowing that your ad, your page and what your page endorses all say one thing is worth more than hoping they do and finding out from opposing counsel. For the groundwork on what that alignment actually measures, see what ad-to-page congruence is. For the parallel story in regulation rather than case law, where disclosure obligations are also landing on the advertiser, see the EU AI Act's Article 50 and ad-to-page governance and this week's companion on the IAB's updated AI disclosure framework.
Where to start
Individual marketers can run a free audit to see where an ad and its page diverge today, three analyses, no card required. Teams that want every live pair scored continuously should look at the Pro and Agency plans. Agencies will feel this first, because a client roster multiplies the number of pages and links that now count as claims; the agency overview covers how to govern alignment across every account.
Frequently asked questions
What is the two-click rule in advertising? The two-click rule was an informal assumption, not a statute, that a company avoided liability for claims that lived on a separate website a consumer had to navigate to independently. The idea was that content one click away was the advertiser's speech and content two clicks away belonged to someone else.
What did the Tenth Circuit decide in KetoNatural Pet Foods v. Hill's Pet Nutrition? In a decision issued July 14, 2026, the Tenth Circuit held that a company's own commercial speech can include third-party content it intentionally incorporates through hyperlinks and curated references. That undermines the two-click safe harbor: a claim you deliberately link to can be treated as a claim you made.
Can a hyperlink on my landing page create false-advertising liability? Under the Tenth Circuit's reasoning, yes, if the link is used to intentionally incorporate third-party content as part of your commercial message, for example linking to a study, review or partner page as support for what you are selling. How other circuits treat the question is still open, and this article is not legal advice.
Does the ruling only matter for competitor lawsuits? No. Venable's analysis of the decision warns that its reach extends well beyond competitor false-advertising suits, with implications for FTC, FDA and state consumer-protection enforcement, all of which focus on whether claims are substantiated rather than on how many clicks separate them from the sale.
How does ad-to-page congruence reduce this risk? Congruence checking verifies that the ad, the landing page and the content the page relies on all make the same claim at the same strength. Scoring message match, capturing outbound links and monitoring for drift produces an auditable record that the whole click-through chain tells one consistent, defensible story.