Black Friday 2026: How to protect your Google Ads budget from bot clicks

Key takeaways

Why does Black Friday look cleaner in your account than it is?

The holiday season brings many real shoppers. That pushes down the share of invalid clicks without making those clicks disappear. In Lunio's analysis of 414 million retail clicks from 88 ad accounts, Q4 2025 was the cleanest quarter at 4.18%, followed by 5.28% and 5.54%. Lunio explains this as dilution: there were about 6.6 million invalid clicks in Q4 and about 7.2 million in Q2 2026, even though total traffic had fallen.

For you this means: if your account looks cleaner in November, that is no proof of less fraud. You keep paying for invalid clicks in your highest-budget weeks, they just stand out less as a percentage.

• Automatic distribution: Search volume for your best keywords is limited. Extra budget therefore often moves to partner sites, broad match keywords and automated campaigns.
• Budget jumps: They send Smart Bidding back into learning, and invalid clicks distort exactly that phase.
• Higher click prices: Every invalid click costs you more in the sale week.

About this source: Lunio sells click protection itself. The numbers come from accounts in monitor-only mode, so they show what got past the ad platforms' filters. The article does not name the accounts' countries.

What does AI Max change this year?

AI Max extends Search campaigns beyond your keywords, to queries you never selected. At first it ran cleaner than standard Search: in Q4 2025 Lunio reports 2.46% against 3.72%. In Q2 2026 AI Max stood at 5.28%, which is 72% higher than standard Search in the same accounts. By then AI Max brought 55% of Search clicks but 68% of invalid Search clicks. This is an observation and no proof of cause, and part of these clicks is genuinely additional traffic.

What is new is the timing: since September 2026 Google automatically moves eligible older Search campaigns to AI Max, including those with Dynamic Search Ads, automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match. So you can be affected without ever having opted in, right before the most expensive weeks of the year.

Which campaigns are hit hardest?

Not every campaign type is equally exposed. These are Lunio's Google numbers from late 2025 to mid 2026:

Performance Max looks calm here but has two catches: it is the largest campaign type, and it blends Search, Shopping, Display and YouTube into one number. Good and bad inventory average out, and you can only partly separate them.

In the sale weeks, put extra budget first into the campaigns you can control best, and only then into automated ones.

How much budget does this cost you?

A worked example shows the order of magnitude. It assumes Lunio's average of 5.00% invalid clicks, spread evenly across the budget:

Worked example, not a measurement from your account. Your share can be higher or lower.

The direct loss is only the first part. Invalid clicks end up in your remarketing lists and give Smart Bidding false signals. The algorithm then learns to buy more of exactly the traffic that never buys. You pay for that a second time in January, through a higher cost per sale.

How do you spot invalid clicks in your account?

No single signal proves fraud. When several appear together, take a closer look:

1. Clicks without a session: Google Ads counts clearly more clicks than Analytics sees visits from Google Ads.
2. Bounce rates near 100% on individual placements or search partners.
3. Click spikes at hours when your customers are asleep.
4. Many clicks from data centers instead of private connections.
5. Forms with made-up details or orders that never get paid.

You can check the first point yourself in a few minutes: put a campaign's clicks from Google Ads next to the same campaign's sessions in Analytics, for the same days. A small difference is normal, for example from declined cookies. If the gap grows on exactly your highest-budget days, that is a warning sign.

What does Google credit, and what not?

Google filters invalid clicks continuously. What it catches before the end of the billing cycle is never charged. What it finds later it credits, in its own words "when appropriate and possible". You find these amounts on your invoice as "Invalid activity".

For everything Google does not find itself there is the investigation request. It has a deadline:

You can submit an invalid traffic investigation request for activity within the last 60 days.

Google Ads Help, About invalid traffic

For Black Friday on November 27 this deadline runs until January 26, for Cyber Monday until January 29. A request is no promise, Google reviews and decides itself. What counts is evidence: timing, origin and behavior of the clicks. But you only have such evidence from the day you start measuring. What happened before can hardly be shown later.

What should you get done by November 27?

1. Check AI Max: See whether Google has moved your Search campaigns, and evaluate them separately.
2. Check search partners: switch them off for the sale weeks or evaluate them separately.
3. Set exclusions: exclude suspicious placements and IP ranges before the budget jump.
4. Raise budget in steps instead of doubling overnight.
5. Keep click data: store server logs and Analytics data from the sale weeks.
6. Start in time: Black Friday and Cyber Monday then fall within your 30 free days, and you have evidence for your request to Google.

You can do the first four in an afternoon. The fifth needs a setting at your host or in your Analytics account. The sixth decides whether you can document the most expensive days of the year at all.

How seacashback helps you

seacashback checks the clicks on your landing pages, excludes detected bots at account level and documents invalid clicks so you can claim them from Google. You see up front how much of your budget is affected, and then you decide.

Read how it works under How it works and see a real example in the case study.