{"id":7834,"date":"2026-10-22T17:31:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adtek.agency\/glossary\/invalid-traffic-ivt\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T17:31:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:31:55","slug":"invalid-traffic-ivt","status":"publish","type":"mona_glossary","link":"https:\/\/adtek.agency\/en\/glossary\/invalid-traffic-ivt\/","title":{"rendered":"Invalid traffic (IVT)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Invalid traffic (IVT) is impressions, clicks, and other ad activity that fails quality criteria or does not come from legitimate users, so it has to be removed from measurement and billing. The Media Rating Council (MRC) splits IVT into two groups: GIVT and SIVT.<\/p>\n

What is invalid traffic (IVT)?<\/h2>\n

The MRC defines IVT as traffic or activity tied to ads and content (impressions, viewable impressions, clicks, engagement, and even conversions) that does not meet certain quality or completeness criteria. The cause can be non-human traffic such as bots and spiders, or activity designed to produce IVT (MRC, IVT Standards Addendum, June 2020<\/a>).<\/p>\n

IVT is broader than ad fraud<\/a>. Google Ad Manager counts accidental clicks and repeated clicks as IVT, even when the person clicking had no intent to cheat (Google Ad Manager Help, Invalid traffic, accessed October 2026<\/a>).<\/p>\n

GIVT vs SIVT under MRC standards<\/h2>\n

The current MRC standard was issued in June 2020 and replaced the original guidelines from October 2015. The two groups differ in how they are detected and what filtering is required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>\nGIVT (general invalid traffic)<\/th>\nSIVT (sophisticated invalid traffic)<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Detection<\/td>\nLists and standardized parameter checks<\/td>\nAdvanced analytics, multi-point corroboration, human review<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Examples<\/td>\nKnown data center IPs, self-declared bots and crawlers, non-browser user agents, 0x0 or 1×1 ads<\/td>\nBots posing as users, emulators, hijacked devices, organized click farms, ad stacking, domain or app ID spoofing, ad injection, cookie stuffing<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Obligation<\/td>\nMandatory for MRC-accredited measurers, must be removed from billable counts<\/td>\nEncouraged, accredited separately, can be removed later to keep detection methods from being reverse engineered<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

For data center GIVT, the MRC requires, at minimum, filtering invalid traffic from IPs of the three largest hosting providers: Amazon AWS, Google, and Microsoft. An interim update in April 2024 warned that as IP addresses get hidden and user agent strings get less detailed for privacy reasons, list-based filtering will weaken (MRC, 2024 IVT Interim Updates, April 2024<\/a>).<\/p>\n

How Google Ads handles IVT<\/h2>\n