Guide

A few years ago, a globally recognised brand cut two-thirds of its annual online advertising budget around $100 million. What happened next revealed a shocking truth about the digital advertising industry.   There was little to no drop in performance. Conversions held steady, demand didn’t collapse, and the business continued as usual. The reason wasn’t efficiency; it was ad fraud and the brand that showed the mirror to the world was Uber.  Fast forward to 2026, and the problem has only become more complex.  If you are investing in paid media in 2026, it’s important to know that your PPC campaigns may already be exposed to highly sophisticated fraud tactics, many of them powered by advancements in AI. What once started as a side effect of digital advertising has now evolved into a deeply embedded part of the ecosystem marketers operate in today.  According to the recent Imperva report, automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time in a decade, accounting for 51% of all web traffic in 2024. This surge has been driven by the rapid adoption of AI and large language models (LLMs), which have made bot creation easier, cheaper, and far more scalable.  The challenge is even more pronounced in PPC campaigns within walled gardens, where limited transparency and closed ecosystems make fraud harder to detect.  This click fraud guide serves as a practical framework to help you understand how modern click fraud works and how to act against it effectively.  What is Click Fraud Click fraud is a fraudulent practice of triggering repeated clicks on online advertisements to give a false idea of performance (augmented number of impressions and clicks), generating unfair revenue for publishers and draining budgets of advertisers allocated to PPC campaigns ad budgets of advertisers. To generate fake clicks, fraudsters put bots in action or hire low-paid workers to click on ads repeatedly.  The problem becomes bigger in affiliate campaigns when brands trust their affiliates. but they become the one causing major attribution problem through simpler and sophisticated fraud tactics that we are going to cover further.  Types of Click Fraud Click fraud is broadly classified into two main categories, both aimed at creating a false sense of campaign performance. For brands running PPC campaigns across web and app environments, fraud can occur at every level, sometimes in obvious, low-effort forms, and other times through highly sophisticated methods that closely mimic real user behavior.   Following are some of the common click fraud types –  Click Farms Click farms use large groups of low-paid workers who are instructed to manually click on ads or perform specific actions like visiting a page for a fixed time or installing an app. Since real people carry out these activities, the traffic looks more genuine than bot traffic and can easily slip past basic fraud detection systems.  Competitor Clicks In this type of fraud, competitors intentionally click on your ads to drain your advertising budget and reduce your campaign’s effectiveness. These repeated, non-genuine clicks increase costs without any real intent to convert, pushing your ads out of auctions faster and lowering overall ROI.  Advanced Click Fraud Fraud used to be easy to spot—repetitive patterns, sudden spikes, and low-quality traffic. But AI has changed the click fraud landscape. Now, bots can mimic real users and generate fake clicks in web and app campaigns.  Bots can now mimic real users, triggering fake clicks across paid campaigns in web and app environments. In fact, reports show bot activity has risen for the sixth consecutive year, with 37% of all internet traffic now being bot driven. Following are the tactics through which bots trigger fake clicks –  Headless Browser Bots These are advanced bots that operate within real browser environments, allowing them to behave like human users. They can scroll pages, click ads, and spend time on sites, making their activity difficult to distinguish from genuine traffic and harder for basic fraud tools to detect.  Click Injection In click injection fraud, advanced bots trigger a fake “last click” on a user’s device just moments before an app is installed. This tactic mainly targets app campaigns, where the fraudster steals the credit for the install, even though they played no real role in driving the user to install the app.  Botnets Botnets are large networks of infected devices controlled remotely by fraudsters. These devices generate fake clicks, installs, or impressions from different IP addresses, locations, and devices, making the traffic appear distributed and legitimate.  Incent Fraud Here, users are rewarded with points, money, or other benefits for clicking ads, installing apps, or completing tasks, attracting incentivized traffic. While real users are involved, they have no genuine interest in the brand, leading to low-quality traffic and poor conversion outcomes.  Read in detail about incent fraud and its impact Domain Spoofing In domain spoofing, bots disguise low-quality or fraudulent websites as well-known, trusted domains. This makes the traffic appear premium, misleading advertisers into paying higher prices for inventory that has little or no real value.  Read in detail about how AI enables fraud and yet AI is the only defense How Click Fraud Impacts Advertisers? The impact of click fraud is not limited to merely one aspect of marketing funnel, it extends beyond that impacting the entire funnel. Following are the ways in which it largely impacts advertisers –  Ad budget is consumed by fake clicks Money is spent on bots or hired click farms instead of real users. For example, a campaign with a ₹1,000 daily budget may exhaust it by noon due to fraudulent clicks, stopping ads from reaching genuine prospects later in the day.  Cost-per-click (CPC) increases artificially Repeated fake clicks raise competition signals in ad auctions, pushing CPCs higher. Advertisers end up paying more for the same keywords without any improvement in conversions.  Sales teams chase fake or low-quality leads Click fraud often generates invalid leads or empty form fills. Sales teams spend time calling numbers that don’t connect or emails that never respond, reducing productivity.  Geographic and device targeting get distorted Bots often operate from specific locations or devices. Advertisers may mistakenly block or scale down regions or audiences that appear “low quality” but are actually victims of fraud traffic.  Reduced ROI and campaign scalability Even high-intent campaigns fail to scale because fraud eats incremental budget. Performance plateaus not due to market saturation, but due to invalid traffic.  Bottom of the Funnel Impact of Click Fraud The entire marketing funnels comes under attack when click fraud happens and its bottom of the funnel impact is much more distorted –  High CTR,