Invalid traffic detection gets smarter with HUMAN’s Page Intelligence

HUMAN Security launched Page Intelligence today, a new capability in its Advertising Protection suite designed to detect invalid traffic (IVT) at the page level — the critical moment between a click and user interaction.

The company says the product offers real-time visibility into IVT activity that traditional pre-bid filters and post-campaign audits can’t capture, enabling brands, publishers and ecommerce platforms to protect revenue and enhance performance accuracy.

Closing the gap between clicks and engagement

While pre-bid systems screen for fraud before an impression is served and audits validate results after the fact, HUMAN argues that the period between those checkpoints remains a blind spot for most digital marketers.

“With Page Intelligence, what we’re doing is extending our protection to the landing page,” Geoff Stupay, SVP of Global Product at HUMAN, told MarTech. “A landing page could be for a brand that wants to monitor the traffic arriving there or for a publisher that drives visitors to that page. It’s about visibility into what’s actually happening once a user — or a bot — shows up.”

Page Intelligence aims to fill that gap by analyzing behavior on-page as it happens, identifying suspicious patterns and filtering out fake interactions before they distort key metrics, such as engagement rates, conversions or ROI.

Dig deeper: How to tackle ad fraud in 2025

The solution uses a lightweight, asynchronous tag — designed to integrate easily without affecting page load speed — to capture and analyze signals in milliseconds. It classifies activity as human or invalid using the HUMAN Defense Platform’s 400+ algorithms and predictive models, which adapt to evolving threats.

“Invalid traffic drains revenue and distorts performance data across the entire digital advertising supply chain,” Stupay said. “Page Intelligence provides immediate visibility to identify and act on IVT instantly, protecting performance-data integrity and unlocking smarter monetization strategies.”

What marketers get

HUMAN positions Page Intelligence as both a protective and optimization tool, offering a mix of fraud detection and analytics. Key features include:

• Real-time IVT visibility upon page load, protecting revenue without disrupting the user experience.
• Detailed analytics by traffic source, campaign, device, and page to inform optimization.
• Validated audience segmentation, allowing teams to remove invalid users from retargeting and data workflows.
• Improved data quality through advanced, adaptive detection models.

Stupay explained that the system gives customers both analytics and mitigation options.

“After traffic arrives, you can get full analytics tailored for the use case of that brand or publisher — when invalid traffic occurred, from where, and on what devices,” he said. “But the next step is mitigation. A brand might decide not to count a form fill if it appears invalid. A publisher might choose not to show an ad to what we’ve identified as a bot. It’s about giving them control in real time.”

The company also sees Page Intelligence evolving with generative AI and agentic browsing.

“We’ve lived in a world where, for the most part, a bot is a bot, and it’s something you don’t want to show ads to,” Stupay said. “But now we’re moving to a new scenario where we’re asking what kind of bot it is. Classifying that traffic — distinguishing between malicious and legitimate automation — is the next phase of what we’re rolling out.”

Helping publishers clean up inventory

For publishers, the tool can improve both performance and reputation.

“Your domain is basically your reputation,” Stupay said. “If you have a large percentage of invalid traffic, you want to know where it’s coming from. This lets you judge your traffic sources, crank up the good stuff, turn off the bad stuff, and stop invalid bid requests before they ever go upstream.”

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He added that cleaner inventory ultimately drives up the value of the publisher’s domain and builds trust with advertisers and partners.

Behind the scenes, HUMAN continues to evolve its detection technology. Stupay said the company maintains a 24/7 threat-intelligence team of data scientists and analysts who monitor signals and harden protections as new tactics emerge. Its Satori team focuses on “raising the consequences” for fraud by working with law enforcement and partners on real-world takedowns of criminal ad-fraud operations.

Why it matters for marketers

Page-level invalid traffic has become one of the hardest-to-measure forms of waste in digital advertising. Bots can trigger clicks, load pages and even simulate engagement signals, inflating metrics while draining media budgets.

By focusing detection where it matters — between click and conversion — HUMAN’s Page Intelligence can provide marketers and publishers with something they’ve long needed: clarity about which interactions are genuine and which are undermining performance budgets.

“If you think invalid data is valid and you start targeting more like it,” Stupay said, “you end up optimizing toward the wrong audiences and experiences. We’re helping our partners stop that contamination at the source.”