Not all invalid traffic is filtered to the same standard

The revenue mechanism

Not every request that hits a publisher's ad server represents a person who might buy something; bots, data-center traffic and automated browsing all generate requests that look like impressions unless something filters them out first. How much of that raw traffic a measurement vendor is allowed to count commercially is governed by the Media Rating Council's Invalid Traffic guidelines. MRC's own standards listing records the current version, the Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines and Addendum, as originally issued in October 2015 and last updated in June 2020. The revenue mechanism runs through this document directly: a publisher's reportable, billable impression count is whatever remains after a vendor applies this filtration, so the guideline effectively sets the line between traffic a publisher can invoice for and traffic it cannot.

What the documents show

The addendum itself, dated June 2020, splits invalid traffic into two tiers. "General Invalid Traffic," or GIVT, is "identified through routine means of filtration executed through application of lists or with other standardized parameter checks," with examples including known data-center traffic, declared bots and crawlers, and non-rendering sessions. "Sophisticated Invalid Traffic," or SIVT, covers harder cases requiring "advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration/coordination, significant human intervention," such as automated browsing from hijacked devices or incentivized human activity. The document states that "all accredited or certified digital measurement organizations must apply GIVT detection processes," while SIVT filtration is separately accredited and "strongly" recommended rather than uniformly mandatory for every metric type.

The assumptions exposed

The GIVT/SIVT split assumes a vendor's declared methodology genuinely matches what MRC accredited, and that accreditation for one metric, such as display impressions, extends only to the traffic types that metric's audit actually covered, not to every number the vendor publishes. The document itself warns that its own GIVT categories are "defined for illustrative purposes to be applied in MRC IVT accreditation audits" and should not be confused with the Trustworthy Accountability Group's separate IVT taxonomy, even though the two are related. A publisher reading "IVT filtered" on a report should not assume SIVT, the harder-to-detect category, was necessarily included unless the specific accreditation says so. MRC's own accreditation page reinforces this scoping problem generally: it warns that a summary chart of accredited services "is not reflective of each digital platforms' full accreditation scope," the same caution that applies to GIVT-versus-SIVT coverage specifically.

What to check before you rely on it

This is an editorial checklist. A publisher relying on a vendor's "clean traffic" claim should confirm whether GIVT alone, or GIVT plus SIVT, was applied to the specific number being quoted.

• Is the reporting vendor accredited for GIVT filtration only, or also for SIVT on this specific metric?
• Does the accreditation cover the metric type you are being billed on (impressions, clicks, video views)?
• Is a partner's invalid-traffic rate self-reported, or independently accredited against this MRC standard?

The guidelines give the industry a shared definition of what should not be billed, but the split between routine and sophisticated detection means two vendors both calling themselves "IVT filtered" can still be doing meaningfully different amounts of work.