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reconnecting 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Bot farms may make up the bulk of "normal user behavior" at this point. It would explain at lot, actually.
nickabe 17 hours ago [-]
I think you're probably right, and even a lot of the corporate "help" is bots.
DamnInteresting 11 hours ago [-]
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.
fhn 15 hours ago [-]
Google doesn't want to remove bots. It inflates their numbers. See how many devices saw your ad? Millions!
mey 15 hours ago [-]
This seems to be reflected in their recent changes in how they track views on YouTube
absoluteunit1 4 hours ago [-]
This is a really good marketing strategy to drive traffic.
tomwheeler 20 hours ago [-]
And yet they trap me in endless captchas because I use Firefox with an adblocker.
nickabe 19 hours ago [-]
Clearly a bot - what human wouldn't want to see ads?
mook 18 hours ago [-]
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.
cyanydeez 14 hours ago [-]
Bots have probably existed on google for two decades, so probably a boiling frog situations.
burnt-resistor 16 hours ago [-]
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.
fhn 15 hours ago [-]
Congratulations, now you are an Google unpaid employee
lta 14 hours ago [-]
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'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
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.
Given their push for AI, that could even be a consistent view… not great for us meat bags, of course.