: Adsense click bot is click bombing my site I have a site that get's roughly 7,000 - 10,000 page views per day right now. Starting around 1 AM on 7/1/12 I noticed the CTR was rising dramatically.

@Alves908

The Thing you have done is the right. whenever such a things are happened you are suggested to remove your ads in order to get banned and inform the google about it.

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@Cofer257

Thanks for the great suggestions guys. This is what I ended up doing:

<?php if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Chrome/20') == false) { ?>
Show AD if browser isn't Chrome/20
<?php } ?>


I was able to see that the bot was indeed changing IP's for every click. But, it always used Chrome/20 as a browser; that was the only consistent attribute. So, I conditionally blocked ads for anyone using that browser. It's definitely a compromise for now and will lose a bit of profits. But, it's better than the alternative. Also, in a month or so I'll remove it and if the bot's still on the prowl.

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@Goswami781

Although I totally agree with danlefree and his previous answer, there are some ways to make it more difficult for bots, at least for "not-so-clever" bots.

1 - Other than IP and User-Agent strings, you could try to set a cookie and display ads only if cookie is set. Also, if the bot uses cookies, try to see if it's clever enough to clear them when it changes IP (it probably will, but it's worth a shot). If it doesnt, then you could use an unique_id cookie to prevent the bot from clicking.

2 - If you have multiple bot-hits with the same IP, you could try also to display: none in the CSS file a block of code similar to an AD, and see if the bot clicks on it. If it does, you can ban it from hitting other ADs (until it changes IP).
3 - I do not think it's worth it, but you could try to train a Machine Learning algorithm that prevents displaying the ads to suspected bots, but you will probably have some(many) false positives, as it is really hard to predict what user is a bot based solely on behaviour (especially if the bot tries to emulate a human).

You probably cannot ultimately defeat this bot, but can still try to make its "life" harder.

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@Angie530

How can I block a bot like this?


There is no foolproof way for you to block illegitimate clicks on ads served with your content - if a human can click the ads, so can a bot.

Detection and mitigation is Google's responsibility, so (beyond completing your due diligence by reporting activity which may reflect poorly upon the status of your AdSense account) you can limit the scope of your concerns regarding these bots to whether or not their activity is impacting site performance for legitimate visitors.

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