What is invalid traffic?
Invalid traffic (IVT) is ad traffic that does not represent a legitimate opportunity for a person to see an ad: bots, data-center traffic, crawlers, hidden or stacked ads, and spoofed devices, apps, or domains. The Media Rating Council splits it into general IVT, caught by lists and routine filters, and sophisticated IVT, which needs deeper analysis. Bidders try to filter it before bidding.
Also called: IVT, GIVT, SIVT, ad fraud, non-human traffic, bot traffic.
How it works
OpenRTB gives buyers the raw material for IVT checks but no verdict. Device.ip, Device.ua, and Device.sua feed data-center and bot detection, Device.ifa and App.bundle feed device and app spoofing checks, and Source.schain shows whether the seller path is accountable. A bidder that passes on a request for these reasons can say so with no-bid reason 3 (Known Web Crawler), 4 (Suspected Non-Human Traffic), or 5 (Cloud, Data Center, or Proxy IP).
General IVT covers what published lists and simple rules catch: known crawlers, data-center IP ranges, and self-declared bots. Sophisticated IVT includes hijacked devices, malware-driven sessions, spoofed domains or bundle IDs, and fake server-side ad insertion made to look like real playback, and it usually takes a specialist measurement vendor to find. MRC-accredited measurement is expected to filter both.
Much IVT detection happens after the auction, so a bid that cleared can later be clawed back or discounted. Request accuracy matters here: a truncated IP, a missing user agent, or an inconsistent device type does not prove fraud, but it removes signals that would clear legitimate traffic. A valid payload is not proof of valid traffic, because schema validation and IVT filtering answer different questions.
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Related terms
Every term is in the glossary.