In today’s digital marketplace, invalid click traffic poses a significant challenge for online advertisers. Defined as any interaction with an ad that doesn’t stem from a real person with genuine interest, invalid traffic undermines trust, wastes advertiser budgets and diverts revenue from legitimate publishers.
Google Ads has long been at the forefront of defending against these threats to help maintain trust in their advertising platform and to achieve more effective results for advertisers. They provide a report in the invalid clicks identified for each campaign and don’t charge advertisers for any suspicious or unusual click activity, which can be particularly prone from the display network.
Google’s approach combines advanced technology, human oversight and extensive policy efforts to detect and filter invalid activity, including accidental clicks caused by poor ad placement, deliberate fraud by bots, or malicious actors and even incentivised clicking.
A cornerstone of Google’s defense is its Ad Traffic Quality Team, composed of PhDs, data scientists, researchers and engineers who employ a multi-layered strategy. This includes live reviewers, automated filters, machine learning and ongoing research to sift out as much invalid activity as possible.
To aid this, more than a hundred sophisticated algorithms and over 200 real-time filters are deployed to catch suspicious behaviour from unusual IP addresses to inflated clickthrough rates, before any click charges are incurred.
Importantly, Google doesn’t stop at technological defences. When invalid behaviour is identified, either automatically or via manual review, Google swiftly takes corrective action: suspending or disabling offending accounts, withholding payments from the publisher and issuing refunds to advertisers not only for the current month but often retroactively for the previous month as well.
The latest innovations take things a step further. In August 2025, Google announced that its Ad Traffic Quality team, in collaboration with Google Research and DeepMind, began deploying large language models (LLMs) to more precisely identify ad placements that generate invalid behaviours.
This technology analyses app and web content, ad placement and user behaviour to deliver faster, stronger protection. Early results are impressive: a reported 40% reduction in invalid traffic from deceptive or disruptive ad practices.
Despite these robust systems, Google Ads also empowers advertisers and publishers to guard against invalid activity proactively. Resources are available to help monitor ad performance and invalid click numbers, interpret server logs, track analytics and adjust practices to reduce risks.
Publishers are encouraged to double-check ad implementations, block suspicious traffic sources and use tools like the Ad Review Center to prevent accidental or incentivised clicks
Together, these efforts form a comprehensive shield, combining human expertise, automated sophistication and AI-powered innovation to preserve the integrity of digital advertising and ensure that advertisers pay only for meaningful, genuine engagement.
If you want to know more about how Google’s defences against invalid behaviour can help your business’s Ads campaign, please get in touch.