Google on Wednesday revealed that it suspended over 39.2 million advertiser accounts in 2024, with a majority of them recognized and blocked by its methods earlier than it might serve dangerous advertisements to customers.
In all, the tech big mentioned it stopped 5.1 billion dangerous advertisements, restricted 9.1 billion advertisements, and blocked or restricted advertisements on 1.3 billion pages final yr. It additionally suspended over 5 million accounts for scam-related violations.
The highest six advert coverage violations included advert community abuse (793.1 million), trademark misuse (503.1 million), personalised advertisements (491.3 million), authorized necessities (280.3 million), monetary companies (193.7 million), and misrepresentation (146.9 million), amongst others.
Many of the pages on which its advertisements had been blocked or restricted embody sexual content material, harmful or derogatory content material, malware, surprising content material, weapons promotion and gross sales, on-line playing, tobacco, alcohol sale or misuse, mental property abuse, and sexually express content material.
Google mentioned it has been utilizing synthetic intelligence (AI) powered instruments to rapidly flag rising threats and abuse patterns, utilizing indicators like enterprise impersonation and illegitimate fee particulars as early indicators to sort out advert fraud.
“As an example, we tackled AI-generated deepfakes utilized in public determine impersonation scams, suspending over 700,000 accounts for this particular violation as a part of our broader effort that blocked/eliminated 415 million advertisements and suspended over 5 million accounts for scam-related violations,” the corporate mentioned in an announcement shared with The Hacker Information.
Google additionally mentioned it expanded Advertiser id verification to greater than 200 nations and territories to extend transparency and implement necessities for AI-generated content material in election advertisements. Because of this, greater than 8,900 new election advertisers had been verified and over 10.7 million election advertisements from unverified accounts had been eliminated in 2024.
Google’s ongoing efforts in the direction of advertisements security come as malvertising continues to be an necessary preliminary entry vector for malware, with menace actors abusing fraudulent advertisements on Google Search (and different search engines like google) to drive customers to phony websites.
“The advert security panorama is consistently altering, reshaped by technological breakthroughs like developments in AI, rising abuse ways, and international occasions, demanding steady agility from our trade,” it mentioned.