GIVT (general invalid traffic)

GIVT is the easy-to-spot part of invalid traffic. It is the traffic an honest system can catch with standard lists and simple checks, without needing to study the behaviour of each session in depth.

The MRC IVT guidelines give typical GIVT sources: known data center traffic (IP ranges belonging to hosting providers rather than homes or phones), bots, spiders and crawlers that declare themselves, which are listed on the IAB/ABC Spiders & Bots List, activity from non-browser user agent strings or unknown browsers, and pre-fetch or pre-rendered pages that were never actually shown to anyone. Much GIVT is not malicious at all: a search engine indexing a page is doing its job, it just should not be billed as an ad view.

MRC expects anyone counting ads to filter GIVT at a minimum. Being accredited only for GIVT does not mean a vendor can find fraud; that requires SIVT detection. Buyers should ask which tier a vendor's numbers cover, because a report that says "0.5% IVT" might only be measuring GIVT.

Think of it like this

GIVT is like a bouncer checking IDs against a printed list of banned names: quick and reliable for known troublemakers, useless against someone with a convincing fake ID.

An example

An SSP sees 2 million requests a day from IPs registered to a major cloud host and 80,000 from a user agent that declares itself a monitoring crawler. Both are GIVT and are removed before billing with simple lookups.