What is a traffic quality score?
A traffic quality score is a rating of how genuine and valuable a source of visitors is. Search engines keep internal scores that influence how much they pay for partner clicks. Independent vendors publish their own, built from signals about bots, fake clicks and behaviour. A low score usually means lower revenue per click, deductions or loss of the feed.
There are two kinds of traffic quality score. The engine's internal one is mostly invisible; publishers infer it from smart pricing effects, coverage and deductions. Providers sometimes share a simplified rating per Channel ID.
The second kind is one you can measure yourself. ClearTrust's TQI Score™, the Traffic Quality Index, is an example: it scores traffic using more than 150 filters for bots, fake clicks and fake impressions. An independent score lets a buyer compare sources, placements and creatives on quality as well as price, and pause a source before month-end deductions arrive. No third-party score replicates the engine's own judgement, so treat it as an early warning, not a guarantee.