Click Fraud Protection Guide

Types of Click Fraud

Click fraud takes several forms in affiliate marketing:

Bot traffic — Automated scripts generating fake clicks
Click farms — Low-paid workers clicking links repeatedly
Competitor clicks — Competitors exhausting your click budget
Self-clicking — Publishers inflating their own traffic numbers

Bot Detection

GeoRedir automatically detects 40+ known bot patterns from User-Agent strings. When bot protection is enabled on your link, detected bots are blocked from being redirected.

Enable bot protection when creating or editing a smart link by toggling the "Block Bots" option.

Enable on All Links

We recommend enabling bot protection on all your smart links. There's no downside — real visitors are unaffected, and bots are blocked from inflating your click stats.

IP Blocking

Block specific IP addresses from clicking your links. This is useful for:

Blocking known fraudulent IPs identified in your traffic quality reports
Blocking competitor IPs
Blocking IP ranges from data centers or VPN providers

Manage blocked IPs from the Blocked IPs page in your dashboard. You can block IPs globally (all links) or per specific link, with optional expiration dates.

Traffic Quality Score

GeoRedir calculates a traffic quality score (0-100) for each link based on:

Unique visitor ratio (unique vs duplicate clicks)
Fraud flag frequency (how many clicks have suspicious patterns)
Bot detection rate
Click velocity patterns

A score above 80 indicates healthy traffic. Below 60 suggests significant fraud issues. View your traffic quality on the analytics page for each link.

Click Velocity Detection

GeoRedir flags clicks from the same IP that occur too frequently — more than 5 clicks within 60 seconds is flagged as suspicious. These clicks are still redirected but marked with a high_velocity fraud flag.

Review Before Blocking

High velocity doesn't always mean fraud. Shared WiFi networks (offices, campuses) can produce high velocity from legitimate users. Review suspicious IPs before adding them to your block list.

Best Practices

Enable bot protection on all links. It's a free, zero-downside protection layer.
Check traffic quality weekly. Review your quality scores and investigate drops.
Block suspicious IPs promptly. Don't wait — fraudulent clicks waste budget and skew analytics.
Use conversion tracking. The best fraud indicator is a high click count with zero conversions.
Set up alerts. Configure alerts for unusual click spikes to catch fraud early.