Is your competitor clicking your Google Ads? What we learned when most of our clicks were not real

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In the first nine days of October, 69% of the paid clicks on our own Google Ads were not real customers. Not a client account. Ours. So when a business owner asks us whether a competitor is clicking their ads, we no longer answer from theory. We answer from our own logs, our own support ticket and the reply Google sent back.

This guide tells that story in full, explains what Google says it does about fake clicks, and walks you through what to check, what to change and how to ask Google for a credit while the window is still open.

The questions business owners ask first

Before the story, here are the short answers to the questions we hear most. Each one is covered in more detail further down.

Can a competitor really click my Google Ads?

Yes. Anyone who sees your ad can click it, including a competitor, an annoyed former customer, or someone paid to do it. Most deliberate clicking today is not one person at a desk. It is automated: scripts, rented servers and cheap mobile connections that make each click look like a different visitor.

Do I pay for those clicks?

Sometimes. Google filters a share of invalid clicks before you are billed, and you are not charged for those. Clicks its systems miss are billed like any other click unless Google later detects them or you ask for an investigation.

How would I know?

Your Google Ads reports will not tell you on their own. The clearest signs show up on your website: the same click repeating from different places, visits from countries you do not serve, traffic from servers rather than homes or phones, and leads that make no sense.

Will Google credit me for fake clicks?

You can ask Google to investigate activity from the last 60 days. If it finds invalid clicks that were billed, it issues a credit to your account. You cannot claim anything older than 60 days, so speed matters.

Is click fraud illegal in Canada?

Deliberately clicking a business’s ads to drain its budget can fall under the fraud offence in the Criminal Code. Proving who did it is the hard part. We cover this near the end.

Our story: what we found in our own account

We run Google Ads for Canada Create™ the same way we run them for clients, with Search campaigns for our core services and a Performance Max campaign alongside. Like most agencies, we watched cost per lead creep up through the summer and put it down to competition. Then the leads started to look strange.

Form submissions arrived with nonsense in the message box. Others were sales pitches or job requests sent through a form that only appears after an ad click. A few came in clusters minutes apart. None of it looked like a business owner looking for help.

Our website records the Google click ID that comes with every paid visit, along with the time, the visitor’s IP address and whether they did anything on the page. So we went back through every paid landing from late July to early October, about 1,400 clicks in all, and sorted them.

What the logs showed

Roughly four in ten paid clicks over that period showed clear signs of invalid traffic. Worse, the share was climbing:

• About 24% of paid clicks in early August.
• About 35% in September, with one day in mid-September when more than 150 suspicious clicks landed.
• 69% from October 1 to 9.

The patterns were not subtle once we looked for them:

• The same click, three countries. A single Google click ID is created for one click on one ad. We saw the same click ID arrive three times on one day, from a data centre in Amsterdam, a cloud server in Toronto and a mobile network overseas. A real person cannot do that.
• Servers, not people. Dozens of paid landings came from data centres and cloud hosts. One ad-tech company’s servers clicked more than 40 times in two days with an automated browser signature.
• Countries we have never targeted. More than 70 click IDs came from mobile networks in a country we do not serve and have never advertised to. Our campaigns target Canada.
• One address, over and over. One IP address recorded more than 130 ad landings in a single day. Another recorded 65 inside one minute.
• Leads with no intent. The form submissions tied to these clicks were spam, pitches and job requests.

One detail changed how we saw it. Background bot traffic touches every advertiser at a low, steady level. This was different: concentrated, rising week by week, and coming from places our ads were never meant to reach. It looked aimed at us.

We cannot prove who was behind it, and we will not guess in public. What we can say is that the pattern fits deliberate, targeted clicking far better than random noise.

The support ticket: what happened when we reported it

Google limits investigations to the last 60 days, so on October 14 we filed a claim covering mid-August to mid-October. Getting it filed took longer than it should have.

• The invalid click form linked from older help articles now leads to a “page not found” error.
• The working route goes through Google’s new AI support assistant, which first opened a different account linked to the same login and had to be told which one we meant.
• The assistant would not link the investigation form directly. It offered phone, chat or email, and the email option opened a detailed contact form.

We filled it in properly: account, campaigns, dates, keywords, the patterns above, a list of more than 50 suspicious IP addresses and a spreadsheet of the worst sources. A case number arrived within minutes, followed by a note that the matter had gone to a specialist team with a review time of two to three business days.

Google’s answer

The reply came the next morning. It said Google’s systems had already filtered 1,083 invalid clicks on our account in the period we reported, that we were not charged for them, and that some filtered traffic is simply accidental, like the second click of a double click.

That was not the question. We never asked about the clicks Google caught. We asked about the ones it did not catch and did bill. A reply describing filtered clicks tells you the system is working on some of the traffic. It says nothing about the paid clicks still getting through.

If anything, 1,083 filtered clicks in about two months supports the complaint. An account under that much invalid activity is very likely paying for some of it too.

We replied in the same thread, pointed out the difference between filtered and billed clicks, asked for the case to go to Google’s ad traffic quality team for a manual review, and offered the full click-level file with every click ID, timestamp and IP address. At the time of writing that reply has not been answered. We will update this article when it is.

What Google says it does about invalid clicks

To be fair to Google, its position is consistent and clearly written. Here is what it says, in plain terms, from its own help page on invalid traffic:

• Automatic filtering. Automated systems and manual reviews look for traffic that does not represent genuine interest, such as bots, accidental clicks and deliberate clicking by competitors. Invalid clicks caught before your billing cycle ends are removed from your reports and your bill.
• Later credits. If invalid traffic is found after you have been billed, Google issues an “Invalid activity” credit on a later invoice, where appropriate and possible.
• Where to see it. The Invalid clicks column in your campaign reports shows what was filtered. Credits appear in Billing under Summary, as adjustments labelled Invalid activity. The Invalid Activity Credit Report in the Report Editor shows your metrics with credits applied.
• Investigations. If you suspect invalid traffic that was not filtered, you can request an investigation into the last 60 days. Google asks for your customer ID, exact dates, campaign and ad group names, suspicious keywords, IP addresses, device details, click IDs and, for lead problems, your assessment of each lead.
• Limits. Google says investigations take several business days and that it will not confirm whether specific clicks were judged valid or invalid, because that could show fraudsters how detection works.

Google is also clear that lead quality is shared work. Its systems cannot see what happens on your website after the click, so it recommends protecting forms with tools like reCAPTCHA and server-side checks, and focusing campaigns on qualified leads rather than raw form fills.

None of this is new. Advertisers took Google to court over click fraud in the United States in the mid-2000s, and the case settled in 2006 for US$90 million, paid as advertising credits rather than cash. The problem has changed shape since then, from people clicking to automated networks, but the gap between what is filtered and what is billed is the same argument.

Industry estimates of what ad fraud costs advertisers worldwide run into the tens of billions of dollars a year. Those numbers are disputed, and no one outside the ad platforms sees the full picture. Your own account is the only number that matters to you.

What to do: a step-by-step guide

These are the steps we took on our own account and recommend to any business spending real money on Google Ads. Most take minutes.

1. Look at what Google already filtered

Add the Invalid clicks column to your campaign table (Campaigns, Columns, search for “Invalid clicks”). Then open Billing and check the Summary for Invalid activity adjustments. A high filtered count is not proof of a problem, but a sudden jump is a reason to look harder.

2. Make your website keep a record of every paid click

Google adds a click ID to the address of every paid visit (gclid, or gbraid and wbraid on some mobile traffic). Ask your developer to save that ID with the time, IP address, device and whether the visitor scrolled, clicked or filled in a form, and to attach it to every lead. Without this record you have suspicion. With it you have evidence Google can match to its own data.

3. Tighten location targeting

By default Google can show your ads to people who have shown interest in your area, not just people who are there. Change each campaign’s location option to Presence: people in or regularly in your included locations. Google explains the setting in its guides to location options and to preventing clicks from outside your targeted locations.

Then add every country you do not serve as an excluded location, and put your city or region in your ad text. A Toronto ad that says “Toronto” puts off people searching from elsewhere.

4. Exclude the worst IP addresses

Google lets you exclude up to 500 IP addresses per campaign, and you can block a whole range by using an asterisk for the last part of the address. Performance Max does not take campaign-level IP exclusions, so use the account-level list under Admin, Account settings. Google’s IP exclusion guide has the steps.

Treat this as damage control, not a fix. Automated clicking rotates through addresses, so an exclusion list stops repeat offenders but not new ones.

5. Review where your ads show

Search partner sites and Display placements carry more junk traffic than Google Search itself. If a campaign does not need them, switch them off. For Performance Max, review placement reports and use the account-level exclusions available to you.

6. Protect your forms

Add bot protection to every form, validate submissions on the server, and consider a confirmation step for email leads. This will not stop the clicks, but it stops fake leads from reaching your sales team and from teaching Google’s bidding to chase more of the same traffic.

7. Know the warning signs

Check your click records weekly for:

• One click ID arriving more than once, especially from different IP addresses or countries.
• Visits from data centres, cloud hosts or ad-tech companies rather than home, office or mobile connections.
• Clicks from places you do not target.
• Many clicks from one IP address in a short time.
• Paid visits with no scrolling, no clicks and no time on the page.
• Form submissions full of nonsense, pitches or job requests.
• A rising share of all of the above month over month.

8. File an investigation inside 60 days

The window closes on a rolling basis, so the oldest days of a bad stretch expire first. Start from Google’s click quality contact form. If it routes you to the support assistant, ask it plainly to submit an invalid traffic investigation for your account, check that it has picked the right account, and choose email so you have a written record. Include:

• Your 10-digit customer ID, the campaigns affected and the exact dates.
• The keywords driving the suspicious clicks.
• A plain description of each pattern with a dated example.
• A spreadsheet of IP addresses with counts, first and last seen times and what you saw from each.
• Click IDs for the suspicious visits and, for lead problems, your assessment of each lead.

9. If the answer misses the point, reply in the same thread

If the reply only talks about clicks that were already filtered, answer in the same email thread and keep the case number. Say clearly that your request concerns billed clicks, ask for the case to go to the ad traffic quality team for a manual review, and offer your full click-level file. Short, specific and polite gets further than angry.

10. Keep the evidence

Save your raw logs, the support emails and any credits that arrive. If you ever identify who is behind it, you will need that record. Deliberately using deceit or other fraudulent means to take someone’s money can fall under section 380 of the Criminal Code. Whether a case like this would hold up depends on the facts and on proving who did it. This is general information, not legal advice: speak to a lawyer before acting on it.

Can a click fraud tool solve this?

Several independent services monitor paid clicks and push blocks to Google Ads automatically. They can save time if you have no developer and a large budget. Judge any of them by four things: whether they read the click ID and not just the IP address, whether they block at account level so Performance Max is covered, what evidence they hand you for a Google claim, and whether the cost is lower than the waste they stop. No tool can prevent every fake click, because the click happens on Google before any of them sees it.

What this taught us

Three things stand out from our own experience.

• Your own records are your strongest evidence. Google will not show you click-by-click decisions. A file of click IDs, times and addresses is what turns a complaint into a case.
• “Filtered” and “billed” are different questions. Make sure every message to Google is about the clicks you paid for.
• Watch the trend, not the day. Our problem went from one in four clicks to more than two in three in about ten weeks. A monthly check would have caught it in August.

If your cost per lead has climbed and your leads have got stranger, check your clicks before you raise your budget. A lead is only worth what the click behind it was worth, which is why click quality belongs in every Google Ads review and every lead generation plan.

Case status: our reply to Google is still awaiting an answer. We will update this article with the outcome.