Digital Lexicon Hub

Clicks on pay-per-click ads made by bots, scripts or people with no genuine interest, generating cost or publisher revenue without real demand.

Fraudulent clicks consume budget and feed false signals to automated bidding, so campaigns may shift spend toward placements, keywords or regions that produce clicks but no customers.

A B2B advertiser sees 400 clicks a week from one display placement with 2-second sessions and no form fills. It excludes the placement in Google Ads, adds Fraud Blocker to block repeat IP addresses, and requests an invalid click investigation.

Platforms already filter many invalid clicks before billing, so third-party tools often report more fraud than platforms credit. IP blocking misses bots on residential proxies and can exclude real buyers behind shared corporate networks.

Google Ads groups invalid clicks into accidental clicks, automated traffic from bots and malicious software, and deliberate manual clicks meant to raise an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Automated filters, machine learning and manual review remove invalid activity before billing, return its cost to the budget, and issue credits when it is found later. Click fraud is the click-level subset of Ad Fraud and affects Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns on search, display and partner networks.