What is Invalid Traffic (IVT)?

What invalid traffic (IVT) is, the difference between GIVT and SIVT, and why high IVT rates reduce your CPMs, trigger revenue deductions, and can put your account at risk.

Invalid traffic (IVT) is any ad impression, click, or interaction that is not generated by a genuine human visitor with a legitimate interest in the content. It is one of the biggest challenges in programmatic advertising, and it directly affects your earnings and account standing.

Types of invalid traffic

The IAB defines two categories:

General Invalid Traffic (GIVT)

Traffic from known non-human sources that can be identified through routine filtering:

Data centre traffic and hosting providers accessing pages programmatically
Known crawlers and web scrapers (search engine bots, SEO tools, monitoring services)
Ad verification and measurement tooling (e.g. IAS, MOAT scan traffic)

Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)

More advanced forms that require dedicated detection:

Bot networks (botnets) running on infected consumer devices
Click farms — low-cost human labour generating fake interactions
Ad stacking (multiple ads layered in a single placement, only the top one visible)
Domain spoofing (claiming to be a premium publisher when you are not)
Browser manipulation scripts injecting ads into pages without publisher knowledge

Why IVT matters to you as a publisher

Even if you run a completely legitimate site, your traffic can include IVT — bots and scrapers visit every website. The key distinction is the proportion of IVT in your overall traffic. Problems arise when:

DSPs detect high IVT rates and reduce bids or block your inventory. Most demand partners run their own fraud detection and will penalise or exclude inventory with elevated IVT signals.
GAM deducts IVT-sourced impressions during reconciliation. Revenue figures for a prior day may decrease when GAM's post-delivery filtering removes fraudulent impressions. This is normal and expected.
High IVT can trigger account review or suspension. If your site's IVT rate consistently exceeds acceptable thresholds, Advlume's compliance team will contact you to investigate.

What Advlume measures as IVT

Advlume uses a real-time client-side traffic quality signal (ADMD) injected by the wrapper. For each page session, a risk score from 0 to 1 is evaluated:

Score 0 — clean session, ads served normally
Score 0.1–0.9 — elevated risk, ads served but flagged for monitoring
Score 1 — high-risk / non-human session, all ad rendering blocked immediately