Clicks, visits or impressions
Some count ad clicks, some count visits to websites, some count ads shown. A share of impressions isn’t a share of clicks.
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Lunio’s Global Invalid Traffic Report 2026: what it means for UK advertisers
2.7 billion paid clicks across six ad platforms: invalid traffic by platform, Google campaign type, industry and country, including the UK.
Lunio, January 2026 → -
Google’s 2025 Ads Safety Report: what it does and doesn’t tell advertisers
Google’s own figures for bad ads and suspended advertisers in 2025, the UK snapshot, and why invalid clicks are a separate story.
Google, April 2026 → -
Invalid click rates on Google Ads by industry and campaign type
Fraud Blocker’s figures from over 100 million Google Ads clicks: the average invalid click rate, and how it varies by campaign type and industry.
Fraud Blocker, 18 September 2026 → -
fraud0’s Unmasking the Shadows: paid search against paid social
Invalid traffic measured on websites rather than in ad platforms: by channel, and how many conversions weren’t real.
fraud0, 2025 → -
Spider Labs’ 2026 Ad Fraud White Paper: AI campaigns and short-form video
6.05 billion clicks in 2025: estimated losses, higher risk in AI-optimised campaigns and short-form video, and made-for-advertising sites.
Spider Labs, 2 April 2026 →
Reading the figures
Why the reports don’t agree.
One report says 5% of clicks are invalid, another 35%. Both can be right, because they measure different things.
Before or after Google
Google already filters out and doesn’t charge for some invalid clicks. Some figures count what got past that filter; others count everything.
Whose data
Most reports come from one company’s customers, who signed up because they suspected a problem. That isn’t a random sample of advertisers.
Which campaigns
Search, Display, Video and social ads have very different rates. An average across them all says little about your own campaigns.
Report names are trademarks of their owners; we are not affiliated with them. The figures are the publishers’; the summaries are ours.