30–90% Bot Clicks on Google Ads: Real Cases, Real Fixes

[Yeezypay]

Affiliates running Google Ads have been complaining about inflated invalid click rates for over a year and a half. Since early 2025, threads keep popping up across forums with people reporting 30–50% bot clicks eating through their daily budgets — and basic anti-fraud tools do basically nothing against it.

It's not just noise. People are posting screenshots. One user showed invalid clicks hitting 40% of all clicks — at that point it wasn't nibbling at the daily spend, it was torching almost all of it.



Another guy said the moment he turned on Search Partners, 90% of his budget started going to bots and low-quality garbage. Not a fluke — just Search Partners doing what it does.



There are real ways to bring those numbers down. The catch is that on self-registered accounts, the fixes that help can also get you flagged. More on that below.

Where the Fake Clicks Actually Come From

Google officially puts "invalid clicks" into several buckets:

- Accidental clicks
- Double clicks
- Competitor click fraud
- Publishers clicking their own ads to inflate revenue from placements
- Bots and outright fraud

In affiliate traffic, bots are the main problem. Marketer Mike Ryan dug into this with actual numbers: in his sample, invalid clicks in Search Partners ran around 10%, in Display Network around 17%. He specifically called out Search Partners as a source with an abnormally high share of dirty and fake traffic.

The real damage happens when Google's algorithm starts learning from that bot traffic. If you're optimizing for clicks rather than conversions, the system can fall into a feedback loop — reinforcing the exact garbage sources that are draining your budget.

Someone on Reddit ran a clean test on this. He launched the same campaign without AI Max in late 2025, then again with AI Max in early 2026. Without AI Max: 8% invalid clicks. With AI Max: 19%. Same campaign, one setting changed, more than double the bot share.



After catching that, he had to tear the whole thing down and rebuild — disable Search Partners, disable Display Network, switch optimization goals, run new tests, and watch how the algorithm behaved after each change. On a self-registered account with no history, all that activity looks suspicious. Google has no context on you, and sudden behavior changes read like someone burning through a throwaway before a ban.

The easiest way around that is finding an account with history and trust already baked in. YeezyPay agency accounts come ready to go — because Google already trusts them, you skip the weeks of warm-up and get straight to the actual work: cutting dirty sources and rebuilding the campaign on cleaner traffic.

What Actually Fixes It

Turn Off Display Network and Search Partners

If that's where the junk is coming from, cut it first.



Google doesn't publish the full Search Partners list, but officially it includes way more than just search engines — parked domains, directories, third-party search surfaces, random external pages. This inventory has been getting roasted for years. Google itself quietly started removing parked domains from Search Partners in 2025–2026 because of the exact same complaints — low-intent traffic and junk clicks that advertisers kept reporting.

In practice the Search Partners pool includes small forums, news aggregators, entertainment *marked as SPAM*, and sites that have zero business showing your ads. A case that made the rounds: FBI job listings serving on a zooporn site. That's Search Partners doing its thing.



Cutting these off typically lowers your CPC, reduces junk clicks, and improves ROI on whatever traffic is left.

Kill Performance Max, AI Max, and Auto-Apply Recommendations

PMax and AI Max both decide where your ads show — and give you almost no real visibility into where that actually is. Stats come back aggregated, budget decisions are made by the algorithm, and if invalid clicks are coming through these placements, isolating the source becomes a genuine headache.



People who've dealt with this are pretty blunt: these features exist to expand Google's traffic buying, not to help you spend smarter. If your invalid click rate is climbing inside PMax, the move is to either pause it entirely or run it as a completely separate test with hard budget caps — otherwise its data bleed into your search campaigns and breaks everything.

Auto-Apply Recommendations deserves its own mention. It can quietly re-enable Broad Match, Search Partners, and Display Network on its own — and the notification emails don't always reach whoever is actually running the account. People have reported waking up to thousands in wasted spend before catching it. Turn it off before it starts making decisions for you.



Don't Just Trust Google's Built-In Anti-Fraud

In 2026, bots are genuinely good at acting human. They fill out forms, simulate purchases, leave fake contact details. Google's system can keep treating them as real users and optimize toward them — pushing costs up while quietly destroying your conversion quality from the inside.



External tools like ClickCease and MyClickShield catch what Google misses and meaningfully cut the share of bot traffic the algorithm trains on. Experienced affiliates at this point treat these as non-optional.

Why Self-Registered Accounts Make This Harder

Here's where it gets frustrating. All of the fixes above — cutting sources, running control scripts, updating negative keyword and placement exclusion lists, reining in AI features — look like suspicious activity on a cold account with no history.

No trust, no track record. Sudden behavior changes read as either fraud or a throwaway account being burned before a ban. The result is reviews and blocks before you've had any real chance to clean things up.

The workaround most experienced people use is agency accounts from YeezyPay — aged accounts with established trust that can absorb these kinds of changes without tripping the same flags. On a trusted account you can run budget control scripts, isolate traffic sources, update exclusion lists on a regular schedule, limit AI features — all of it — without the constant risk of getting locked out mid-test and losing the data you've already built up.

Final Thoughts

A lot of Google's automated features seem to work in Google's favor more than yours. Search Partners, Display Network, AI learning loops, and Auto-Apply Recommendations all create conditions where bot clicks eat budget and the algorithm doubles down on the wrong sources.

If your invalid click rate is sitting above 15–20%, the starting point is simple: cut the dirty sources, turn off AAR, add external anti-fraud, and stop optimizing for clicks instead of conversions. Just make sure the account you're doing it on can actually handle the changes without getting nuked in the process.

That said, how much room you actually have to make these changes depends heavily on the account. On self-registered accounts, aggressive cleanup — scripts, exclusion lists, AI restrictions — can look like suspicious activity and trigger a review before you've fixed anything. YeezyPay agency accounts give you more breathing room: the trust is already there, so you can run automation, update negative keyword and placement lists on a regular schedule, and keep the algorithm in check without the constant fear of getting locked out mid-cleanup.