Invalid traffic & fraud · also called TQI, Traffic Quality Index Score
TQI Score™ (Traffic Quality Index)
The TQI Score™ (Traffic Quality Index) is ClearTrust's traffic-quality metric, a 0-10 score with a risk level, built from 150+ filters checking for bots, unsafe traffic and fake clicks or impressions.
TQI Score™ is a proprietary metric from ClearTrust, an ad-fraud and traffic-quality company. ClearTrust describes it as a simple new metric that condenses many checks into one number: traffic is run through more than 150 filters that look for unsafe traffic, bots, fake clicks and fake impressions, and the result is shown as a score from 0 to 10 alongside a risk level.
The idea behind single-number quality scores is readability. A detailed fraud detection report can list dozens of GIVT and SIVT categories, but marketers and publishers often need a quick way to compare traffic sources, campaigns or sites and decide what to keep, investigate or cut.
Like any composite score, it is most useful alongside the underlying detail: which filters fired, on which placements, and how the score trends over time. It complements, rather than replaces, standard measures such as IVT rate, viewability and conversion quality, and the methodology and weighting are ClearTrust's own rather than an industry standard such as the MRC IVT guidelines.
Think of it like this
A TQI Score works like a food hygiene rating on a restaurant door: one number that summarises many separate inspections, with the full report available behind it.
An example
A publisher compares three traffic vendors: one scores 8.7 with low risk, another 6.1 with medium risk and a third 2.4 with high risk. It drops the third vendor and investigates which filters flagged the second.
Related terms
Traffic quality
Traffic quality is how genuine, attentive and valuable a source of visitors or ad impressions is, combining invalid-traffic levels with signals like viewability, engagement, brand safety and conversion.
IVT rate
IVT rate is the share of measured impressions, clicks or visits identified as invalid traffic, usually shown as a percentage and often split into GIVT and SIVT.
Fraud detection
Fraud detection in advertising is the process and technology of identifying invalid or fraudulent impressions, clicks, installs and conversions, so they can be blocked in advance or excluded from billing.
Invalid traffic (IVT)
Invalid traffic (IVT) is any impression, click or visit not coming from a real person with a genuine chance to see the ad, whether caused by bots, fraud or error.
Bot traffic
Bot traffic is visits, ad impressions or clicks generated by automated software rather than people, ranging from honest search crawlers to fraudulent bots built to look human.