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Severe click fraud in Google Search (real people, not bots) – how to detect & stop it?
Posted by on December 4, 2025 at 10:26 pmI run Search ads for a car reseller in a very competitive market. Click fraud was always out of control but recently it's completely mental and I’m trying to understand how people are dealing with this in real life.
This is NOT bot traffic and not random junk from Display.
It’s clearly human behavior, caused by competitors.Here’s what I’m seeing:
- I get 150–250 fake clicks per day when Search is active
- The same keywords get hammered repeatedly (the best performing & most voluminous in terms of search volume)
- Clicks come in bursts throughout the day. Since a click is $2-$3, spend can go +$100 in minutes.
- Very little or no engagement afterward
- CPA perform better than manual CPC in terms of receiving fewer invalid clicks, but less volume and lower quality leads
- The number of offenders seems small: maybe 20–50 IPs max (likely rotating or mobile IPs, not bots)
- I do call ads as well – so I often don’t even get a website visit to analyze
Even when I log IPs on the website, that doesn’t help much because:
- I also get normal organic/non-competitor visitors
- I run call-only ads (no website visit to analyze)
So it’s almost impossible to manually distinguish real users vs click fraud competitors…
My questions:
How do I reliably detect these competitor IPs and block them?
Can fraud be identified when the user never visits the website (call ads)?
Are there any click fraud 3rd party paid tools that actually WORK for:
- Real human click fraud (not bots)
- Competitor attacks
- Call ads
Thank you so much in advance, any help is much appreciated!
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1 Reply
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Human competitor click fraud is pretty common in a lot of local niches… Google barely catches it. Try tools liek ClickCease, Lunio or CHEQ. I don’t have much experience using it but maybe it helps…
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You’re paranoid.
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