Negative SEO has always been a frustrating problem to raise with a client, because the honest answer was that there was rarely anything to do about it beyond disavow and wait. There was no forum, no remedy, and no credible way to price the damage. A ruling from June, surfaced this week, changes the shape of that conversation.
Two caveats before anything else, and they matter. I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. And a ruling on a motion to dismiss is not a finding that anybody did anything. It means the plaintiff has alleged enough that the case can proceed to be tested. Plenty of claims that survive dismissal go on to lose.
What the negative SEO lawsuit actually alleges
The plaintiff alleges a campaign running from April to October 2025 in which more than 2,350 backlinks were built to its site from low-quality sources, with anchor text designed to mislead. The claims were brought under the federal Lanham Act, which governs false advertising and unfair competition between businesses, and under California unfair competition law.
Kennelly allowed the Lanham Act false advertising claims to go forward and dismissed the California claims. The reported reasoning on the surviving claim is the interesting part: the anchor text was literally false because it appeared to promise one destination but sent users elsewhere.
| ELEMENT | DETAIL | WHY IT MATTERS |
|---|---|---|
| Case | Montway LLC v. Nexus AT LLC | Business against business, not platform against spammer |
| Ruling date | June 2, 2026 | Motion to dismiss, not a merits decision |
| Volume alleged | More than 2,350 backlinks | Scale supports intent rather than accident |
| Window alleged | April to October 2025 | Sustained campaign, not a one-off |
| Surviving claim | Lanham Act false advertising | A commercial-speech theory, not a ranking theory |
| Dismissed claim | California unfair competition | The federal route is the one that worked |
The reasoning that makes this portable
Every previous attempt to litigate negative SEO ran into the same wall. To claim ranking damage you have to explain an algorithm nobody outside Google understands, prove causation inside a system with hundreds of moving parts, and quantify a loss that depends on counterfactual traffic. Courts do not enjoy any of that and defendants can muddy all of it.
The anchor text theory sidesteps the entire problem. Anchor text is a published statement, visible to humans, that describes where a link goes. If it says one thing and the link goes somewhere else, that is a false statement made in commerce. No algorithm needs explaining.
That third point is worth dwelling on for anyone who builds links for a living. The same reasoning that makes a malicious campaign actionable does not stop at malice. A large-scale link programme with anchor text that misdescribes the destination is, on this theory, making a lot of statements. Nobody should read one ruling as an existential threat to link building and digital PR, but the sloppy end of the industry has been writing anchor text as a keyword slot rather than as a claim, and that habit now has a downside it did not have in May.
Why the ranking harm was never the point
It is worth being clear that this case does not establish that toxic backlinks damage rankings, and it would be a mistake to let it get quoted that way. Google has said for years that most spammy inbound links are simply ignored, and the practitioner consensus, with plenty of exceptions and loud arguments at the edges, has broadly moved that way too. Nothing in a ruling on a motion to dismiss tells you anything about how a search algorithm behaves.
Expect the misreading anyway. A headline about toxic backlinks and a court will be compressed into proof that negative SEO works, and somebody will use it to sell a monitoring subscription. It is worth being the person in the room who has read the actual reasoning, because the reasoning is more useful than the misreading, and it points at a different set of actions. The teams we work with on digital PR and its measurement have been having a version of this argument about anchor quality for a while.
The claim that survived does not depend on that question at all. A plaintiff does not need to prove the links moved anything in Google. It needs to prove false statements were made in commerce that could deceive and caused it harm. Reputational harm, diverted customers, and remediation costs are all on the table without an algorithm ever entering the room.
“The legal question is not whether the links worked. It is whether the words attached to them were true.”
That separation is healthy, and it points at something the industry has been sloppy about for a decade. We have treated anchor text as a ranking input and forgotten it is also a public description of somebody's business. When we wrote about which link types AI engines actually trust, the through line was that credibility is what carries weight. A link whose description is false is not a credibility signal in any system, machine or human.
What a negative SEO lawsuit needs that most teams do not keep
Here is the practical consequence for in-house and agency teams, and it has nothing to do with suing anyone. If a campaign is ever run against a client, the ability to do anything about it depends entirely on evidence that was collected while the campaign was happening. Backlink indexes are snapshots. Spam domains go offline. Anchor text gets edited. A link that existed in April and vanished in October leaves very little behind.
Most teams do none of this. They pull a backlink report when something looks wrong, which is exactly when the evidence has already started to decay. The change in practice is small and cheap: keep the exports, diff them, and archive anything anomalous while it still exists.
Monitoring and disavow, reconsidered
Disavow has had a strange decade. It went from essential to unnecessary to slightly embarrassing, and a lot of teams stopped maintaining the file at all on the reasonable grounds that Google says it rarely helps. The tooling followed the sentiment: plenty of agencies dropped backlink monitoring from their standard reporting entirely, on the view that it was a legacy metric kept alive by vendors who sell backlink data.
That view was defensible when the only question a backlink profile answered was a ranking question. It is less defensible now that the profile is also a record of what other people have published about your client. Those are different jobs with different retention requirements, and only one of them was ever satisfied by checking a dashboard once a quarter. Any serious SEO and GEO audit should treat the historical link record as a deliverable rather than a diagnostic.
That reasoning is still sound as search hygiene and now incomplete as risk management. A maintained, dated disavow file is a contemporaneous record that you identified a problem, when you identified it, and what you did about it. Whether or not it moves anything in Google, it is documentation, and documentation is what turns a vague grievance into a claim somebody can act on.
The third card is the one most likely to be uncomfortable. Plenty of legitimate link programmes have used anchor text that stretches: a phrase chosen because it is the target keyword rather than because it describes the page. That was a stylistic complaint last year. It is a slightly different kind of complaint now, and the fix costs nothing beyond writing accurate anchors, which is also better practice for the earned media that correlates with AI visibility.
What to change this month
Three changes, none of which need a budget. First, start keeping weekly backlink exports with anchor text and first-seen dates, and stop overwriting them. Second, add an anchor-accuracy check to your monitoring so an anchor that misdescribes its destination raises a flag on its own, without needing a volume spike alongside it. Third, review the anchors your own campaigns are producing and fix any that promise something the landing page does not deliver.
Then leave the legal question alone unless you have a real problem, in which case take it to counsel with your archive in hand rather than a hunch. One ruling on a motion to dismiss is a long way from settled law, and anybody telling you the industry just changed is getting ahead of the record. What has changed is cheaper and more certain: there is now a documented reason to keep evidence you were probably throwing away, and a documented reason to write anchor text that is true. Both were good ideas anyway.
Source: Montway LLC v. Nexus AT LLC, ruling of June 2, 2026, reported by Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land, August 12, 2026 (coverage). Nothing here is legal advice.
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Josh leads work at the intersection of SEO and generative engines at Something Inc., helping B2B brands get ranked and cited across every major AI engine.