Tunnel = a 1-mile stretch of road you own. Zone = a neighborhood-sized area of about 0.28 square miles that you own. Background = the whole member network, no geography limit. Full glossary
Definition
Invalid Traffic (IVT): Invalid Traffic, or IVT, is the industry term for any digital ad impression generated by something other than a legitimate human viewer. It covers data-center bots, AI crawlers, malware-driven hidden browsers, ad-stacking, pixel-stuffing, domain spoofing and SDK spoofing. The Media Rating Council classifies IVT in two tiers: General Invalid Traffic (GIVT), which routine list-based and rules-based filtration catches, and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT), which mimics human behavior and needs advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration and human investigation to detect.
Two organizations measure this at scale and publish their method. DoubleVerify's 2025 Global Insights Report covers measurement year 2024 across more than one trillion impressions, and puts fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic at 1.0% in North America and 0.8% in the United States. The Association of National Advertisers builds its quarterly transparency benchmark from impression-level logs matched across buy side and sell side, and its Q3 2025 findings put invalid traffic at 0.3% of programmatic spend on web and mobile excluding connected TV. Those two are the answer to the question in the headline.
So why does a search for this question return 20% and 30%? Because vendors that sell fraud detection also publish quarterly IVT press releases, and those releases put the rate an order of magnitude higher without disclosing how the sample was drawn or what counted as invalid. We do not quote them. When a figure differs from a measured, methodology-stated benchmark by roughly twenty times, the burden is on the higher figure to explain itself, and a press release does not.
The practical consequence for a local business is the opposite of what most fraud content implies. If you spend $1,000 a month on programmatic advertising, the measured bot loss is somewhere around $3 to $10. The money that never clears the industry's own quality bar is a much bigger number, and it is not being stolen. It is being spent on the chain.
Measurement year 2024, over 1 trillion impressions; United States 0.8%
DoubleVerify 2025 Global Insights Report, North AmericaQ3 2025, web and mobile excluding CTV, from impression-level logs
ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q3 2025Q3 2025 TrueAdSpend, web and mobile excluding connected TV. Last quarter the ANA itemized that cut; current all-environments headline 45.1% (Q2 2026)
ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q3 2025The ANA's Q3 2025 benchmark, on web and mobile excluding connected TV, splits the programmatic dollar three ways. Transaction costs take 26.9%: SSP platform fees 13.2%, DSP data fees 3.6%, DSP platform and other costs the balance. Media-productivity loss takes 26.1%. What is left, 47.1%, is what the ANA calls TrueAdSpend: the share that became a benchmark-qualified impression, meaning measurable, viewable, non-MFA and non-invalid. Whether a person then looked at it is a separate question the benchmark does not answer. The ANA builds the waterfall sequentially, which is why 26.9 plus 26.1 does not add to exactly 47.1. Q3 2025 was the last quarter the ANA itemized this cut; on its current all-environments basis the figure is 45.1% for Q2 2026, and the two bases never belong on one trend line.
Open the productivity-loss bucket and the ranking is unambiguous. Non-measurable impressions are 15.2% of the dollar. Non-viewable impressions are 10.1%. Made-for-advertising sites are 0.5%. Invalid traffic is 0.3%. Non-measurable inventory alone is fifty times the size of the bot problem, and it is the least discussed line in the whole industry, because nobody sells a product that fixes it.
The historical structure comes from the ANA's December 2023 study, which itemized $1,000 of open-web programmatic spend down to $360 of working media and estimated $22 billion in available industry efficiency. That study is the right source for the shape of the chain and it is five quarters stale on level: we cite it as structure only, always date-stamped, and never as today's number.
One more distinction worth getting right, because it is widely mangled. The ANA's Q4 2025 findings report a higher-performing half at 56.7% of TrueAdSpend and a lower-performing half at 37.5%. That is a median split on the outcome, dividing benchmark participants into halves by how much of their spend qualified. It is not a comparison between advertisers who run a transparency program and advertisers who do not, and anyone presenting it that way is selling something.
Of the ad dollar, Q3 2025. Fifty times the invalid-traffic line
ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q3 2025Of the ad dollar, Q3 2025
ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q3 2025The ANA's 2023 study, structure only. Current level: 45.1% all environments (Q2 2026), 47.1% on the Q3 2025 ex-connected-TV cut
ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study, December 2023| Line | Share of the ad dollar | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction costs | 26.9% | SSP platform 13.2%, DSP data 3.6%, DSP platform and other costs the balance |
| Non-measurable impressions | 15.2% | Served, but no measurement vendor could verify anything about them |
| Non-viewable impressions | 10.1% | Measured, and failed the MRC viewability standard |
| Made-for-advertising inventory | 0.5% | Sites built to harvest ad spend rather than serve an audience |
| Invalid traffic (bots) | 0.3% | The line this page is nominally about |
| TrueAdSpend (benchmark-qualified) | 47.1% | Measurable, viewable, non-MFA, non-invalid. Not a measure of whether a person looked |
Saying the level is one percent is not the same as saying nothing is happening. DoubleVerify's 2025 report measured bot fraud up 101% year over year in North America, driven largely by mobile-app video, and general invalid traffic up 86% in the second half of 2024. Those are real growth rates on a real problem, and the honest way to state them is exactly like this: a fast-growing share of a small number.
A striking part of that growth is not adversarial at all. DoubleVerify attributed 16% of the general invalid traffic increase to AI crawler bots. Crawlers that index the web for AI training and retrieval are not trying to defraud anyone, but they are not human, so under the MRC standard any ad rendered to one is invalid by definition. Whether the advertiser was billed for it depends on the filtering in their stack, not on the definition.
The reason the level stays near one percent while the growth rate runs in triple digits is that the measured figure is post-filtration on campaigns running verification. That is worth saying plainly rather than hiding: DoubleVerify measures what its customers buy, and its customers are running fraud detection. What no source at our bar publishes is a credible measured rate for unverified campaigns, so we do not quote one.
Year over year, measurement year 2024, driven by mobile-app video
DoubleVerify 2025 Global Insights Report16% of the increase came from AI crawler bots
DoubleVerify 2025 Global Insights ReportThe MRC's Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Standards split IVT into two tiers, and the split is worth understanding because it explains why measured rates differ between vendors and why a platform-level filter is not the same as verification.
General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) is non-human traffic that is straightforward to identify: declared crawlers, AI scrapers, data-center IP ranges, and behavior that is obviously not a person, such as loading a new page every two seconds for six hours. Routine list-based and rules-based filtration catches it.
Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) is the harder tier: hijacked devices running hidden browsers, ad-stacking, pixel-stuffing, domain spoofing, SDK spoofing in mobile apps, and abuse of server-side ad insertion in connected TV. These schemes imitate cursor jitter, scroll dwell and click cadence. The MRC standard is explicit that detecting them takes advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration and human investigation, which is not work an exchange can do inside a 100-millisecond auction.
A related standard gets misquoted constantly, so for the record: the MRC and IAB viewability guideline says a display ad is viewable when at least 50% of its pixels are on screen for at least one continuous second, and two seconds for video. That is a definition, not a rate. The MRC does not publish a percentage of anything, and any page that cites it for one has invented the number.
Two continuous seconds for video. A definition, never a rate
MRC and IAB Viewable Impression Measurement GuidelinesDisplay 73%, video 79%, measurement year 2024
DoubleVerify 2025 Global Insights ReportIf you have read that a fifth of web impressions or a third of mobile-app impressions are invalid, you have read a vendor press release. Those figures move quarterly, arrive through newswire distribution, and do not state how the sample was selected, what share of it was open-exchange long-tail inventory, or what test classified an impression as invalid. That is not a small gap in rigor. It is the entire basis on which a rate can be believed.
The measured benchmarks we do cite state their basis in the document. DoubleVerify names the measurement year, the impression volume and the geography. The ANA names the number of participating marketers, the spend, the impression count and the environments, and it publishes its own limitations: a small base of large national advertisers, medians rather than means, and a waterfall that excludes agency fees, ad serving and brand-safety fees. A benchmark that tells you its own weaknesses is doing something a press release is structurally not built to do.
This site had the vendor figures on it until August 2026, alongside third-party ad-fraud loss totals that traced back to a whitepaper hosted by a company selling click-fraud protection. We removed them rather than dressing them up in a better-looking citation. If the honest number is one percent, the case for a different advertising model has to be made on something other than bots, and it can be.
Invalid traffic, non-measurable impressions and non-viewable impressions share one root cause: the advertiser pays for an inferred event, generated upstream, by infrastructure the advertiser does not control. Every hop between the buyer and the human is a place where something can be inserted, mismeasured or simply lost.
WilDi Maps replaces the impression-and-auction model with Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD). Pricing starts from $0.25 per verified delivery on the background tier and is set by account tier: Enterprise $0.25 at $3,000 a month or more, Pro $0.32 at $1,000, Local $0.40 at $250, Starter $0.50. Tunnels and zones cost more than the background rate for hyper-local precision. A delivery is not an impression and it is not a lead: it is one offer reaching one opted-in person whose location was verified, billed only when that person claims it.
We are not claiming this buys more impressions per dollar. It does not, and the cross-channel CPM tables make that obvious. It buys a different unit, one where the ANA's non-measurable and non-viewable buckets have nothing to measure because there is no impression to miss.
The product
WilDi Maps is not a single flat-rate product. You pick the tier that matches how local you need to be. All three are GPS-verified per claim, with no auction, no exchange rake, no Middleman Tax.
1-mile road strip
Premium
Hyper-local, just-in-time
Claim a one-mile stretch. When a member enters the strip, they get a just-in-time message, perfect for emergency services, on-route specials, and anything where being right there now beats brand awareness later.
Best for
0.28-square-mile area
Premium
Hyper-local, area-based
Claim a one-square-mile block, not tied to a single road. Catches the residential cluster, retail district, or industrial park where your work actually lives. Same just-in-time delivery as tunnels; different geometry.
Best for
City-wide rotation
From $0.25
per claim, tier-based
City-wide brand presence on rotation. Highest reach for the budget; best when familiarity beats precision. Per-delivery rate drops by tier (Enterprise: $0.25 / Pro: $0.32 / Local: $0.40 / Starter: $0.50). See /pricing for the live rate card.
Best for
What the member gets when an ad is claimed
If the member wants to act on the ad, the app navigates them straight to the advertiser's location.
Click-through to any URL: ordering page, brand site, blog post, lead form.
Open a specific page inside the WilDi app: promo details, daily specials, claim instructions.
See the full pricing breakdown on the pricing page.
About one percent. DoubleVerify's 2025 Global Insights Report, covering measurement year 2024 across more than a trillion impressions, put fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic at 1.0% in North America and 0.8% in the United States. The ANA's Q3 2025 transparency benchmark, built from impression-level logs, put invalid traffic at 0.3% of programmatic spend on web and mobile excluding connected TV. The double-digit rates that circulate online come from vendor press releases with no disclosed methodology, and we do not quote them.
Because those figures come from quarterly press releases published by companies that sell fraud detection, distributed through newswires, without a stated sample or a stated test for what counts as invalid. They differ from the measured benchmarks by roughly twenty times. The sources we cite publish their basis in the document: DoubleVerify names the measurement year, impression volume and geography; the ANA names its participant count, spend, impression count, environments and its own limitations. When two numbers are that far apart, the one that will not show its method is the one to drop.
Into the chain and into inventory nobody can measure. On the ANA's Q3 2025 benchmark for web and mobile excluding connected TV, transaction costs take 26.9% of the ad dollar and media-productivity loss takes 26.1%, leaving 47.1% as TrueAdSpend, the share that became a benchmark-qualified impression. That was the last quarter the ANA itemized the ex-connected-TV cut; its current all-environments headline is 45.1% (Q2 2026). Inside that productivity loss, non-measurable impressions are 15.2% and non-viewable impressions are 10.1%, against 0.5% for made-for-advertising sites and 0.3% for invalid traffic. Non-measurable inventory alone is fifty times the size of the bot line, which is why this page does not lead with bots.
Yes, quickly, from a small base. DoubleVerify measured bot fraud up 101% year over year in North America, driven largely by mobile-app video, and general invalid traffic up 86% in the second half of 2024, with 16% of that increase attributed to AI crawler bots. The level stayed near one percent while those growth rates ran in triple digits, because the measured rate is what remains after filtration on campaigns that run verification. No source at our sourcing bar publishes a credible measured rate for unverified campaigns, so we do not quote one.
GIVT (General Invalid Traffic) is the MRC's tier for non-human traffic that routine list-based and rules-based filtration catches: declared crawlers, AI scrapers, data-center IP ranges, and behavior that is obviously not a person. SIVT (Sophisticated Invalid Traffic) is the harder tier: hijacked devices running hidden browsers, ad-stacking, pixel-stuffing, domain spoofing, SDK spoofing in mobile apps and server-side ad insertion abuse in connected TV. The MRC standard says SIVT detection requires advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration and human investigation, which no exchange can perform inside a 100-millisecond auction.
Under the MRC standard, yes. They are not malicious; they index the web for AI training and retrieval. But they are not human, so an ad rendered to one is invalid by definition. DoubleVerify attributed 16% of its measured increase in general invalid traffic in the second half of 2024 to AI crawler bots. Whether an advertiser was actually billed for those impressions is a question about the filtering in their ad stack, not about the definition.
It is a definition, not a rate. The MRC and IAB guideline says a display ad counts as viewable when at least 50% of its pixels are on screen for at least one continuous second, and two continuous seconds for video. The MRC publishes no percentage of impressions that meet it. Measured viewability comes from verification vendors: DoubleVerify reported an authentic viewable rate of 71% in North America for measurement year 2024, 73% on display and 79% on video.
45.1% on the ANA benchmark's current all-environments basis (Q2 2026, reported by Fiducia), and 47.1% on the Q3 2025 cut for web and mobile excluding connected TV, the last quarter the ANA itemized that basis. The two are not comparable and never belong on one trend line. Qualified means measurable, viewable, non-invalid traffic and not made-for-advertising; whether a person then looked is a separate question the benchmark does not answer. The ANA also splits participants into halves at the median of TrueAdSpend in its Q4 2025 findings: the higher-performing half converted 56.7% of spend, the lower-performing half 37.5%. That is a median split on the outcome, not a comparison between advertisers who do and do not run a transparency program. The December 2023 study's 36 cents is the structure of the chain at that date, not the current level.
There is no auction surface for one to attach to. A delivery is billed only when a known member account, on a known device, with a GPS position inside the tunnel, zone or background area the advertiser bought, claims the offer, and the event is written by infrastructure WilDi controls end to end. There is no public bid request broadcasting slot IDs and user signals, and no third-party SDK reselling location. That is an architectural statement rather than a measured comparison, and given that the industry's own measured rate is about one percent, it is not the main reason to buy a delivery instead of an impression. The main reason is the 26.9% of the dollar that never becomes advertising at all.
One verified delivery of your offer to the phone of one real person who was physically inside your chosen geography at that moment, confirmed by GPS on the device itself. That person also taps to acknowledge the offer, so a delivery is never an invisible impression. Bots, background tabs, and off-screen impressions cannot generate one. You are billed only when a verified delivery happens.
Background reaches everyone active in the WilDi app: nationwide by default, or limited to one area you choose (your city, your side of town) so budget is never spent outside it. A zone is a neighborhood-sized area you hold exclusively: while it is yours, no competitor can run there. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you can place anywhere, and it follows the road's contours, ideal for the approach to your shop or a route your customers already drive.
Real local people who opted in to get offers in our app while they are out driving. Not bots, not a gig fleet. Location is reported by the phone itself, and each person earns a share of every offer they accept. There is no ad exchange in the loop, which is why bot exposure is 0%.
No. Every tier has a fixed, published rate per verified delivery. The price you see is the price you pay, whether it is game day or a Tuesday morning. Higher tiers carry lower per-delivery rates.
About this analysis
Written by Timm Ross, founder of WilDi Maps · Jacksonville-based · Veteran-owned. Sources are cited inline; we update the numbers when the underlying research updates.
Published · Last updated
More about Timm RossFixed from $0.25 per GPS-verified delivery. No auction, no bid stream, no Middleman Tax.
