I'm familiar with some issues related to 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.
Thanks for the post, Nick.
I'm familiar with some issues related to 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
Bot farms may make up the bulk of "normal user behavior" at this point. It would explain at lot, actually.
I think you're probably right, and even a lot of the corporate "help" is bots.
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.
And yet they trap me in endless captchas because I use Firefox with an adblocker.
Clearly a bot - what human wouldn't want to see ads?
The two could make sense if they decided a normal user is a bot, and it's the humans that are not normal.
Given their push for AI, that could even be a consistent view… not great for us meat bags, of course.