What is seat allow and block lists?
Seat allow and block lists restrict which buyer seats may bid on a request. BidRequest.wseat lists the only seats allowed, BidRequest.bseat lists seats that are barred, and a request should use at most one of them. A seat is a buyer account, such as an agency or an advertiser, whose ID the exchange and the bidder agree on in advance.
Also called: wseat, bseat, seat allowlist, seat blocklist, buyer seat restrictions.
How it works
wseat dates from OpenRTB 2.0 and bseat from 2.5. Both are string arrays of seat IDs, and leaving both out means any seat may bid. Deals carry their own allowlist in Deal.wseat, which scopes one deal to named buyers, and Deal.wadomain limits a deal to listed advertiser domains. Seat IDs are not standardized: each exchange assigns its own, so one agency has different seat IDs on different exchanges.
The bidder states which seat it is bidding for in SeatBid.seat in the response. That value is what the exchange checks against the lists, so a bid with a missing or wrong seat can be rejected even when the buyer was entitled to bid. Bidders that represent many seats should filter before bidding rather than leave the check to the exchange.
Pitfalls: sending both wseat and bseat, which leaves the effective rule unclear; copying seat IDs from one exchange's integration into another's; and confusing seats with advertiser domains, which belong in BidRequest.badv. A bidder that ignores wseat on a private deal spends bids that will be rejected.
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Related terms
Every term is in the glossary.