Catching invalid clicks

The two lines of defence in a search feed: filters that act before an ad is shown, and audits that judge a click after it happened.

1. A visit arrives: Every click on a search ad starts as a visit from some device. Most are people; some are scripts, crawlers or hijacked phones. IVT detection is the work of telling them apart.
2. Line 1: easy catches, before the ad: Pre-click filtering checks what can be known instantly: declared bots, data-centre addresses, impossible device details. This routine layer is GIVT. Blocked visits never see an ad, so no advertiser is charged.
3. Deeper signals: Harder cases need more: device fingerprinting to spot one machine posing as many, signs of a headless browser, or a residential proxy hiding the true origin. Visits that pass go on to the page.
4. An ad is clicked and logged: The visitor clicks a sponsored result. The click is recorded with its context: time, device, the query, how long the page had been open, where the pointer or finger was.
5. Line 2: judged after the fact: Post-click analysis looks at what only shows up in bulk: clicks that never convert, identical timing, the same few devices returning. Disguised, deliberate fraud of this kind is SIVT.
6. Invalid clicks are refunded: A click judged invalid is credited back to the advertiser and removed from publisher earnings. A valid click is billed as normal, say $1.00. Two outcomes from the same button press.
7. Each verdict sharpens the filter: Findings roll up into a traffic quality score per source or placement. ClearTrust’s TQI Score™, for example, combines 150+ filters into one number. A publisher who scores its own traffic can cut a bad source before the engine does it for them.