What Is Invalid Traffic? GIVT, SIVT and the Ghost Devices Inflating Your Reach

In short: invalid traffic (IVT) is any ad impression or click with no genuine human behind it, split into easily-filtered GIVT and sophisticated, human-mimicking SIVT.

Invalid traffic (IVT) is the industry term for ad impressions and clicks that don’t represent a real person who could ever become a customer. It ranges from harmless crawlers to deliberate fraud, and the Media Rating Council splits it into two categories that matter enormously for how you defend against it.

General Invalid Traffic (GIVT)

GIVT is the traffic that identifies itself, or is easy to identify: known search-engine crawlers, data-centre servers, bots on published lists, and obvious non-human patterns. It can be filtered with routine, list-based checks. Most reputable platforms strip GIVT automatically — so if a vendor only reports GIVT, they’re catching the easy stuff.

Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT)

SIVT is the expensive problem. These are bots engineered to mimic human behaviour, hijacked real devices, domain and app spoofing, ad stacking, pixel stuffing and injected traffic. It’s designed specifically to pass the standard filters, and it needs behavioural, device-level detection to catch.

Ghost devices and duplicate IDs

A growing slice of IVT isn’t “bots” at all in the classic sense. Every phone, smart TV, car and alarm carries an advertising ID, and a single person can be linked to many of them. Dormant, recycled and machine-to-machine devices inflate audiences with impressions no human will ever see — reach on paper that doesn’t exist in the living room.

Why it matters

With automated traffic now past half of all web activity (Imperva, 2025), the gap between reported and real reach is wide enough to distort every downstream decision. Filtering to devices with recent, genuine human activity is what turns “impressions served” back into “people reached”.

What to ask your verification partner

In practice, the word to watch for is SIVT. Any competent vendor can filter GIVT; catching the sophisticated traffic engineered to look human is where budgets are genuinely protected or lost. So when you assess a verification partner, don’t ask whether they “filter bots” — ask specifically what SIVT rate they detect, how they detect it, and whether they act on it before or after your money is spent.