Negate ‑ Bot Protection

Negate does not block legitimate crawlers of any type. Useragents can be altered, and malicious actors know this. Many malicious bots will have their useragent tampered with to match that of a legitimate crawler in hopes of getting past your security. That's why Negate uses Google's official documentation to validate their crawlers which involves running a reverse DNS lookup on the accessing IP, verifying the domain, running a forward DNS lookup on the domain, and finally verifying that it's the same as the original accessing IP. We follow the guidelines provided by each markting platform to verify their crawlers. This is outlined within our documentation under our FAQ's. If you have 100's of "google bots" per day, then you absolutely need to be looking further than the useragent. Additionally when click fraud occurs, ad costs go up - which may be why you are seeing an increase in ad spend. It takes time to clean out your pixel from the bad traffic that occurs in those situations (generally pixels hold onto past data for 90-180 days). So if you believe click fraud is happening then it's important to have a good bot protection service. Best of luck in your future endeavors. Negate Support Team