Compliance & regulatory

IVT (Invalid Traffic)

Bot, click-farm, or otherwise non-human ad traffic.

IVT (invalid traffic) is the umbrella term for non-genuine clicks: bots, click farms, datacenter IPs, residential-proxy abuse, automated browser scripts. Networks classify IVT as GIVT (general — easy to filter) and SIVT (sophisticated — needs ML). DSPs and advertisers buy through IAS, DV, MOAT to filter. For arbitrage operators, high IVT on inbound traffic kills downstream RPM (Google strips fake clicks before paying).

Example

Tonic strips 11% of inbound clicks as IVT before paying. Operator's tracker shows 100k clicks; Tonic's revenue report shows 89k 'valid' — the gap is the IVT haircut.

Related terms

MFA (Made-for-Advertising)
Sites built primarily to monetize ad placements with thin content.
Search arbitrage
Buying cheap native traffic to monetize on search-feed clicks.
Compliance
Adherence to ad-network policies, FTC rules, and platform ToS.
Fingerprinting
Identifying users via browser/device signals when cookies are blocked.