I'm familiar with the same bot behaviours (1) on Google Ads, and as far as I know, Google doesn't try very hard to filter or detect such bots — on some verticals they might be half of the traffic, and Google still earns from it.
But I found a potential solution in Google itself, since they provide a tool to select your demographics. If you select all available options and skip unknown, it won't show the ads to some part of the bots. There will still be some percentage, but this cuts out the largest part, since most click bots have no Google history and therefore fall outside the demographic buckets.
For at least 25 years, bot farms have been an easy way for ad presenters and mediators to fraudulently profit without showing ads to real users. It costs money and effort to disambiguate humans from bots.
That's going to create a lot less trouble the next time they have to do a round of layoffs to increase efficiency or whatever fancy BS they'll invent next time ^-^
I received a phishing email that appeared to come from Google, that almost had me convinced. I was in a delicate place--my father was fighting cancer, and my brother had just been horribly injured in a motorcycle accident. I was distressed, and my wits were not about me. The link in the email was to a google.com url, it looked okay.
Luckily I detected the treachery before sending any sensitive data, and I sent the relevant details to the Google bug bounty. Their response was that google.com open proxies are not considered bugs, and the report was closed. Do less evil, Google.
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[ 13.8 ms ] story [ 424 ms ] threadGiven their push for AI, that could even be a consistent view… not great for us meat bags, of course.
I'm familiar with the same bot behaviours (1) on Google Ads, and as far as I know, Google doesn't try very hard to filter or detect such bots — on some verticals they might be half of the traffic, and Google still earns from it.
But I found a potential solution in Google itself, since they provide a tool to select your demographics. If you select all available options and skip unknown, it won't show the ads to some part of the bots. There will still be some percentage, but this cuts out the largest part, since most click bots have no Google history and therefore fall outside the demographic buckets.
1. https://www.tirreno.com/bat/2025-12-27
Luckily I detected the treachery before sending any sensitive data, and I sent the relevant details to the Google bug bounty. Their response was that google.com open proxies are not considered bugs, and the report was closed. Do less evil, Google.