Google has made a point how serious they are against online fraud from robots that crawl the web and rob advertisers of ad dollars by purchasing the London based company Spider.io (TechCrunch) The company is three years old and has technology that Google can build upon to create a robust stack of anti-fraud tools to complement DoubleVerify, its in house fraud protection product.
Up to 60% of internet traffic is said to be robots, a concerning statistic for online advertisers as it is very difficult to determine real traffic from fake traffic. This bot traffic is also very lucrative for websites to purchase because it is cheap, its hard to get caught, and can generate thousands of dollars from advertising exchanges. If a publisher gets caught, they can simply migrate onto a new ad network. Some ad networks turn a blind eye to fraud traffic because it generates them a great deal of revenue.