RPM was tanking — turned out 18% of clicks were bots

RPM was tanking — turned out 18% of clicks were bots
Ok so RPM quietly slid 30% over a month with traffic flat, smelled like invalid traffic. Pulled logs, found one datacenter IP range hammering the site and inflating clicks AdSense was clawing back.
— Blocked the ASN range at Cloudflare
— Added a click-fraud filter on the ad slots
— Invalid clicks 18% → 2%, RPM recovered +27% in 2 weeks
Clawbacks gut your RPM silently. Watch the invalid % like a hawk. Steal it.