Definition & Explanation

Traffic shaping is a fraud tactic where fake traffic is mixed with real traffic to mask bad activity, making it difficult for buyers to distinguish legitimate impressions from fraudulent ones. In its legitimate usage, traffic shaping refers to publishers being more selective about which ad requests are sent to intermediaries like SSPs, filtering out low-quality or fraudulent bid requests through IP filtering and traffic segmentation. However, bad actors exploit this concept by blending bot-generated impressions with genuine user traffic to evade detection and inflate ad revenue.