Data-center traffic

Real consumers connect through home broadband, office networks and mobile carriers. Servers in data centers and cloud platforms are where software lives. So when an ad click comes from an IP range registered to a hosting company, the likeliest explanation is a script.

Because those IP ranges are published and fairly stable, this is the classic example of GIVT under the MRC standards: it can be removed with a list. Search engines filter it routinely, and it almost never earns feed revenue.

There are honest exceptions. Corporate VPNs, privacy relays and some security tools route real people through hosting addresses, so a blunt block can remove a few genuine users. Good filtering considers the other signals too.

For arbitrageurs the practical point is cost. If a traffic source charges for visits from servers, that money is simply lost. A meaningful share of hosting addresses in a campaign's logs is a strong sign the source is padded with bot traffic. More careful fraudsters know this and hide behind a residential proxy instead, which is why data-center checks are a first step, not the last.

Think of it like this

It is a customer survey where a pile of the forms was posted from the printing factory. Whoever filled those in was not a shopper.