AI bot traffic surged 300%, hitting publishers hardest: Report
AI fetcher bots siphon traffic and revenue from publishers, delivering real-time answers that bypass your site and cut referral visits.
Topic: Botnet
Click fraud in Google Ads: Where exposure rises and how to reduce it
From Video Partners to Search, fraud exposure isn’t equal. Learn where invalid clicks spike and how to shift toward higher-intent traffic.
Spam traffic in GA4: How to detect, filter & prevent it
Learn how to identify, filter, and prevent spam traffic in GA4. Fix corrupted analytics, protect data quality, and make better SEO and marketing decisions.
Googlebot fraud (Fake crawlers, bot abuse & how to protect your site)
Learn how Googlebot crawls, renders, and indexes your site. See every crawler type, how crawl budget works, and the technical fixes that improve visibility.
ChatGPT Atlas browser could drain ad budgets by mimicking human clicks
OpenAI's new AI browser ChatGPT Atlas can mimic human clicks, potentially inflating ad costs and distorting website analytics.
X’s surge in traffic for advertisers is fake, report claims
More than 75% of traffic to X advertiser websites has been identified as bots and fake users in a report.
How paid marketers are fighting back against the Fake Web
Bots and fake users steal ad clicks, pollute audience targeting, and skew metrics. Paid marketers are learning to protect themselves.
You still don’t have marketing security?
How fighting bots and fake users became the modern marketer's top priority.
List of Googlebot IP addresses released
Knowing which bot is really Google and which is not can help you decide which rogue bots to block from your site.
Google responds to large ad fraud operation that utilized more than 125 Android apps
The company says the operation affected less than $10M in ad spend and deploys new tactics to fight it.
Brace yourself: The benefit and shock of analyzing Googlebot crawl spikes via log files [Case Study]
Site owners really don’t know the full story about who, or what, is crawling their sites until they analyze their server logs. Columnist Glenn Gabe shares a case study that illustrates some insights to be gleaned from a server log file analysis.
SearchCap: Google mobile-friendly tool, Bing Ads editor & more
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google launches their new mobile-friendly testing tool May 17, 2016 by Barry Schwartz Google revamped the mobile-friendly testing tool after its launch back in November 2014. Bing Ads Editor 11.0 debuts […]
AdWords Click Fraud Service Found Using Google’s Trademark, Promoting Itself On YouTube
How’s this for brazen? For at least two years, a Russian hacker has been running a cheekily-named click fraud service called GoodGoogle, promoting it in videos on Google’s YouTube and using Gmail accounts to correspond with customers. Online security expert, Brian Krebs, recently brought the scam to light. The service enables advertisers to quickly run […]
Report: Click Fraud Rate For Q2 2010 28.9%
Anchor Intelligence released their latest click fraud report claiming the click fraud rate for the second quarter of 2010 was 28.9%. That is actually slightly down from the first quarter of this year, which was 29.2%. But yet significantly up from the prior year, the second quarter of 2009, which was 26%. Anchor Intelligence suggests […]
Click Fraud Rate Hits Highest Level Yet
Click fraud is worse today than ever according to an announcement from tracking company Click Forensics. Click Forensics estimates the overall average click fraud rate for Q4 2008 at 17.1%, the highest level since they began tracking it in 2006. That rate is up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported […]
Estimated Click Fraud Rate Remains At 16%, Says Click Forensics
Click Forensics has released their estimated 3rd quarter click fraud numbers that they track. The numbers remain pretty much the same, at least as it pertains to the overall estimated industry average click fraud rate. The rate is now 16.0%, down from last quarter’s 16.2%. The main change was that botnets were said to be […]
Click Fraud Rate Mostly Unchanged, Says Click Forensics
Click Forensics has released the second quarter results for 2008, showing a slight drop in the estimated click fraud. Last quarter, Click Forensics reported a 16.3 percent rate, and they are now reporting a 16.2 percent rate for Q2 of 2008. However, the rate is up from a year ago, which was a 15.8 percent […]
Report: Click Fraud Up 15% In 2007
Click Forensics, the company that maintains the Click Fraud Index, a network that monitors and reports on data gathered from more than 4,000 online advertisers and their agencies, has released its most recent quarterly report on click fraud. The company found that the overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 […]
Report: Click Fraud Reaches 15.8% In Q2 2007
The Click Fraud Network released (press release) figures for the second quarter of this year, showing click fraud has increase to 15.8% from 14.8% in the previous quarter or 14.1% from Q2 2006. One of the reasons for the increase, according to The Click Fraud Network, is a noticeable increase in botnets, parked domain sites […]
Google Publishes Papers On Clickbots
Last night the Google AdWords blog announced a paper they published named The Anatomy of Clickbot.A. The paper was rewritten by Neil Daswani, Michael Stoppelman, and the Google Click Quality and Security Teams. Here is the abstract: This paper provides a detailed case study of the architecture of the Clickbot.A botnet that attempted a low-noise […]