How is invalid traffic detected in search feeds?

In layers. Simple filters remove known bots and data-centre addresses. Device and browser checks look for automation and spoofing. Behaviour analysis examines timing, movement and click patterns. Statistical checks compare each source with normal rates. Finally, advertiser conversion data shows which sources produce clicks that never become customers. Checks run before the click, after it, and at month-end.

How do I protect my search feed from bot traffic?

Buy only from sources your provider has approved, separate every source and campaign on its own reporting channel, and measure traffic quality yourself instead of waiting for month-end deductions. Block placements with abnormal click rates or no engagement, filter obvious automation before ads are shown, and stop any source whose final revenue keeps falling short of its estimates.

What is Pre-click filtering? Meaning in advertising

Pre-click filtering

Pre-click filtering checks each visitor the moment they arrive and withholds the search ads from those judged invalid, before any click can be charged.

The short answer, from the The Arbitrage Desk glossary

The cheapest invalid click is the one that never happens. Pre-click filtering examines a visit in the instant between arrival on the lander and the ad request to the feed. If the visitor looks like a known crawler, a server, an automated browser or a repeat offender, the page does not call the feed, or shows content without ads.

The checks have to be fast, so they rely on what is knowable immediately: address type (data-center traffic), declared and observed browser traits, obvious automation markers (headless browser), frequency of visits from the same device, and mismatches between claimed location and settings.

For an arbitrageur the benefit is protection of the feed relationship. Bad visits that never generate searches or clicks do not lower the channel's quality in the search engine's eyes, do not trigger smart pricing and cannot be clawed back. The traffic cost is still lost, but the log of filtered visits is evidence for a refund request to the traffic source.

Its limit is that it sees only a snapshot. Well-disguised SIVT passes at the door and is only caught by post-click analysis. The two are used together.

Think of it like this

It is the doorman who turns away known troublemakers at the entrance, so the fight never starts inside.

Pre-click filtering

Think of it like this

Related terms

Post-click analysis

IVT detection

Ad request

GIVT (general invalid traffic)

Data-center traffic

TQI Score™