A federal judge declined to dismiss a lawsuit accusing auto transport company Nexus AT LLC of building a toxic backlink campaign to damage a competitor’s Google rankings. Judge Matthew Kennelly’s June 2 ruling lets plaintiff Montway press a Lanham Act claim for false advertising, plus counts covering trademark and Illinois consumer protection law. The order is not a finding that Nexus did any of this. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, a court assumes the plaintiff’s allegations are true only to test whether they add up to a legal claim, and Kennelly’s order does no more than that.
That procedural framing matters more than the case’s underlying facts, at least for now. For two decades, the only real answer to a suspected negative SEO campaign has been technical: disavow the links, wait, and hope Google’s ranking systems discount them. A false advertising claim clearing dismissal opens a second route, one aimed at the competitor rather than the link graph.
Montway’s verified complaint alleges Nexus generated more than 2,350 backlinks between April and October 2025, all pointing at Montway’s site from spam-filled pages. The anchor text allegedly included phrases such as “buy steroids online,” “illegal betting sites” and “unlicensed firearms.” Montway alleges the goal was twofold: suppress its rankings and tie its brand to illegal products it has no connection to.
Another allegation in the complaint concerns who ordered the work. Montway says an ex-manager at the rival firm came to its executives with an account naming George Arkin, the chief executive there, as the person who instructed an outside SEO contractor to carry it out. Montway further claims that when it wrote to demand the activity stop, in October 2025, what followed was an escalation rather than a halt. None of that has been proven in court. Search Engine Land’s report does not include any response from Nexus or Arkin to the allegations.
Kennelly found the anchor text itself plausibly false advertising. Each phrase promised one destination in its literal wording and delivered visitors to Montway’s site instead. The judge was likewise willing to treat the campaign, as described, as something that could count as “commercial advertising or promotion” in Lanham Act terms, the classification that let the false advertising count proceed. The judge dismissed only Montway’s California unfair competition claim; the trademark and Illinois consumer protection claims survive alongside it.
Harvard Law professor Rebecca Tushnet questioned parts of the court’s trademark reasoning in her analysis on the 43(B)log, even as she engaged closely with its handling of the false advertising claim. Her critique is a reminder that trademark doctrine was not built with negative SEO in mind. No appeals court has weighed in on Kennelly’s Lanham Act theory, and this ruling does not test whether the theory holds up under further review.
Companies that suspect a competitor is manipulating their search visibility have traditionally had one real option: report the activity to Google and disavow the offending links. A false advertising claim surviving dismissal does not change what happens inside Google’s ranking systems. It changes where a target can take the fight: into federal court, against the company allegedly behind the links, rather than only into a disavow file aimed at the links themselves.
The practical shift is procedural, not evidentiary. A false advertising claim survived dismissal on the theory that malicious anchor text is itself a false statement in commercial advertising, not merely a technical ranking signal. Search teams tracking a suspected negative SEO campaign now have a second data point for their response plan: a legal theory to document alongside the disavow file, not a verdict, and not a guarantee that pursuing one succeeds.
Search Engine Land, in a report by Danny Goodwin published Aug. 12, 2026, first reported the ruling.
