Fake traffic detection: spot fake clicks and visits
Fake traffic — bots, click farms and datacenter visits posing as real people — quietly burns ad budget and corrupts your numbers. Here's how to recognize it and how ValidVisit confirms it, click by click.
Where fake traffic comes from
- Bots & automation — automated browsers and scripts imitating users.
- Click farms — low-cost human or semi-automated clicking, often from datacenter/proxy networks.
- Competitor & malicious clicks — draining a rival’s budget on paid search.
- Fake referrals & spam — junk visits that pollute analytics even without ads.
The warning signs
High click volume with no conversions. Sessions that end before they begin. Traffic concentrated on a few sources or publishers. Visits from server farms or proxy networks. Each of these is one of the 100+ data points ValidVisit weighs on every click:
Illustrative example — the same 0–100 score, per source, worst first.
How ValidVisit confirms it
Rather than one rule, ValidVisit weighs 100+ independent data points on every click — spanning the network it came from, the device behind it and how the visitor behaves — and rolls them into a single 0–100 quality score. A genuine human clears the bar while bots stand out. For more, see how click fraud detection works and bot traffic detection.
Turn the signal into action
Every verdict is a transparent 0–100 quality score with a plain-language explanation of what drove it, attributed to the campaign, source and publisher. See the click fraud protection overview, or read what is invalid traffic (IVT).
FAQ
What is fake traffic?+
How can I tell if my website traffic is fake?+
Is fake traffic the same as click fraud?+
Can you detect fake traffic without slowing my site?+
See what your paid traffic really is.
Bots, fake clicks and invalid traffic detected and scored 0–100 — one script, no funnel hop.
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One script · raw IP never stored · GDPR legitimate-interest basis