The rise of competitor click fraud in 2025: Protect your ad spend with ClickPatrol

Competitor click fraud is a more serious form of click fraud, in which competitors or contracted click farms or bots intentionally click your ads.

Statista, the global advertising industry lost approximately $65 billion to digital ad fraud in 2021 alone.

Meanwhile, the ClickPatrol data itself shows that, on average, 14% of sponsored search ads are fraudulent.

In this article, you will learn about the real costs and methods behind competitive click fraud, case studies of how it impacts campaigns, the red-flag indicators to identify such fraud, and a practical approach to protect your ad budgets.

Competitor click fraud: Definition and risks

Most marketers know ad fraud as a broad category of bots, fake impressions, and domain spoofing.

Competitor click fraud, on the other hand, is narrow and intentional: it is a direct or contracted competitor, or their agent, who repeatedly clicks on your paid search or ads with the express purpose of:

• Draining your daily or monthly ad budget so your ads drop out of the auction.
• Poisoning analytics so that your performance appears worse, hurting bidding, and lowering quality scores.
• Wasting internal resources by generating noise and fake leads or traffic.

The scale: how much harm are we talking about?

Ad fraud in general is already significant and growing, and one source of those losses is competitor clicks.

Ad Fraud Scale:

2023 global digital ad fraud losses were estimated to be $84-88 billion, or 22% of total ad spend, and are expected to exceed $172 billion by 2028.

Vulnerability in Search Campaigns:

Up to 20% of all paid-search clicks are fraudulent or invalid, meaning one in every five interactions is wasted on non-human traffic that erodes ROI.

Bot-Driven Epidemic:

Bots and automated farms generate 30% of bad bot traffic, and that number is growing as more of these bots learn to disguise themselves as humans.

Poisoning Bidding Systems:

Fraudulent signals distort automated algorithms, inflating CPCs and skewing performance metrics in real-time bidding environments.

Eroding Data Integrity:

43% of all web traffic consists of invalid traffic, further undermining campaign optimization and trust in analytics.

APAC’s Outsized Impact:

The region faces $33 billion in annual losses, projected to double to $75 billion amid rapid digital growth and high fraud exposure.

Rise of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic:

SIVT now accounts for 17–34% of impressions, with advanced bots complicating attribution by evading basic filters.

How competitor clicks sabotage your PPC campaigns

Competitor clicks are worse than accidental invalid traffic because they are:

Premeditated timing and volume:

Competitors can schedule attacks to align with product launches or high-value campaigns, keeping clicks flowing until budgets are depleted.

Direct sabotage of optimization:

Paid platforms are informed by conversions and clicks. Relevant and fake clicks flood campaigns with signals that are either irrelevant or fake. where algorithms make poor decisions (increased CPA goals, reduced placements).

Hard to argue with ad platforms:

Ad platforms do reimburse some invalid clicks, but manual competitor activity tends to be obscured behind proxies, repeating often enough to trigger automated limits; even when refunded, the damage to historical performance data is done.

Industry case study: The reality of competitor click fraud

Motogolf’s legal action after budget exhaustion

Motogolf, a Las Vegas-based golf equipment retailer, filed suit after learning of repeated intentional clicks from a competing retailer’s devices that repeatedly exhausted daily budgets and removed Motogolf from potential customer view, disrupting demographic and performance insights.

The company claimed more than $5,000 in direct losses and pointed out that even small-scale competitor click attacks can materially harm revenue and strategic decision-making.

Detection signals that point to competitor activity

Not all invalid clicks are competitor attacks, but some red flags certainly suggest targeted competitor behavior.

1. Multiple clicks from the same IP range or subnet during short windows that don’t convert.
2. Repeated visits coming from the same device fingerprint but never reaching conversion pages.
3. High click-through rates from users who instantly bounce (very short dwell times).
4. Clicks that occur only during working hours of a specific region, which would imply manual clicks.
5. Patterns associated with competitor brand searches: clicks that take place when competitor brand terms are active.

How competitor clicks distort your performance beyond budget

Competitor click fraud harms more than immediate spend:

• Degradation of optimization: automated bidding and audience models get trained on noisy signals and false positives; this increases CPA and decreases ROAS.
• Analytics pollution: inflated CTRs, wrong geographic distributions, and fake conversion attempts skew attribution and lifetime calculations.
• Sales and operational inefficiency: fake leads waste SDR/fulfilment resources and reduce confidence in channel performance.
• Escalating bidding wars: competitors force advertisers to higher bids to regain visibility; exactly the intended effect.

Step-by-step: Prevent competitor click fraud with IP blocking

Competitor clicks can quickly drain your ad budget. Blocking malicious IPs is a practical way to stop these attacks in real time and protect your campaigns.

1. Detect suspicious clicks: Use behavioural, device, and network signals to identify non-human or suspicious activity on your ads.
2. Block repeat offenders: Once you identify malicious IPs, subnets, or VPN/proxy endpoints, block them at the network level to prevent these users from ever seeing or clicking your ads again.
3. Update your IP list regularly: Competitors often rotate IPs. Continuously monitor and update your blocked IP list to stay ahead of repeat attacks.
4. Address platform disputes: Use collected evidence of fraudulent activity to request refunds and encourage ad platforms to take action.

ClickPatrol: Automated defense against competitor click fraud

ClickPatrol is specifically engineered to stop targeted competitor click fraud by combining the above layers:

• Continuous monitoring of clicks across campaigns, platforms, and times, using device and behavioural signals to flag suspicious activity.
• Automated IP and VPN blocking, so confirmed bad actors cannot view your ads again. They are blocked from viewing ad creative or landing pages tied to your campaigns.
• Custom rules and whitelists for sensitive campaigns, such as brand terms, high-value keywords, or regional launches, ensure you get instant protection where it really matters.
• Evidence collection for disputes: logs, timestamps, and device fingerprints to help you recover spend where the platforms allow and strengthen future detection rules.

Maximize ROI with defense against competitor click fraud

Competitor click fraud is a real and growing threat: it wastes ad spend, corrupts campaign data, and hurts ROI.

Ad platforms do some detection and issue refunds, but targeted competitor activity is best stopped at the source.

Blocking malicious IPs and preventing bad actors from seeing or clicking your ads is the fastest and most effective defence, and it’s just what ClickPatrol was built to do.

Start using ClickPatrol today to block competitor IPs in real time, prevent wasted ad spend, and boost your PPC ROI.

Abisola

Meet Abisola! As the content manager at ClickPatrol, she’s the go-to expert on all things fake traffic. From bot clicks to ad fraud, Abisola knows how to spot, stop, and educate others about the sneaky tactics that inflate numbers but don’t bring real results.

View all posts by Abisola (Abisola)

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