Google blocked or removed 8.3 billion ads and suspended 24.9 million advertiser accounts in 2025, 602 million of which were directly related to scams.
These numbers show that the amount of fraudulent material trying to reach users has become large enough that an AI system operating on an industrial scale is needed to contain it.
Gemini now analyzes hundreds of billions of signals in real time, such as account age, behavioral signals and campaign patterns, and catches over 99% of policy-violating ads before they are served.
The portion that passed this filter still reached users in one of the largest ad networks in the world.
Generative AI has made fake ads, fake users, fake clicks and fake devices cheaper to produce and harder to distinguish from legitimate activity.
Traditional solutions have proven inadequate as AI-driven fraud evolves faster than detection methods. Google’s response to deploy more AI faster is causing both parties to continually escalate.
A separate group of companies builds verification systems that register who has seen an advertisement and make registration permanent.
The verified attention model
Hakuhodo, the Japanese advertising giant, partnered with Tools for Humanity and LG Electronics to test a ‘Human-Verified Ad Network’ that served ads exclusively to human-verified users, with every impression recorded in LG’s blockchain infrastructure.
The pilot ran from July to August 2025 in Japan and involved more than 3,500 participants and ten advertisers in electronics, travel, food, cosmetics and education.
Hakuhodo integrated its “boba” mini-app with World ID verification and LG’s blockchain ledger, creating a closed loop in which only human-verified users received ads and every impression in the chain was recorded.
World ID allows users to prove that they are unique people without revealing any personal information. Under that architecture, advertisers pay for impressions that include proof of authentication tied to a confirmed human identity.
According to figures from the companies involved, the pilot resulted in a 50% increase in click-through rates and a 15-point improvement in bounce rates.
A mainstream electronics company and Japan’s second-largest advertising agency conducted a blockchain verification test on a live campaign and published the results, separating this step from the white paper proposals.
The verified conversion model
In January 2025, Coinbase acquired Spindl, an on-chain advertising and attribution platform that rebuilt the ad-tech stack on-chain, to address what Coinbase called the “on-chain discovery problem” for blockchain app builders.
Spindl was founded by Antonio García Martínez, an early member of the Facebook advertising team who launched Facebook’s first version of keyword targeting, audience targeting, and Facebook’s programmatic ad exchange FBX.
Spindl focuses on proving that an ad led to real action, such as a wallet interaction, an app install, a token purchase, or a staking event.
Traditional attribution systems infer causality from cookies, click paths and probabilistic matching. Spindl tracks the user journey, from a click on the web to an action down the chain, giving advertisers a ledger entry and a verifiable chain of control.
Spindl runs on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 network, and maintains open standards for publishers and advertisers.
The two models address different parts of the same problem: Hakuhodo and LG verify that a human saw the ad, and Spindl verifies that the ad led to a real action.
Why this is more important than crypto
Dentsu’s global advertising forecast for May 2026 puts global ad spend at $1.06 trillion, with digital accounting for 69% of that total. IAB and PwC reported that U.S. digital advertising revenues reached $294.6 billion by 2025, with programmatic advertising increasing 20.5% to $162.4 billion.
The same automated systems that make programmatic purchasing efficient also increase the surface area on which fake inventory, fake users, and fake results are monetized.
Juniper Research estimated that global advertising spend lost to fraud would rise from $84.2 billion in 2023 to $172.3 billion in 2028, as AI allows fraudsters to mimic human behavior and evade detection systems.
DoubleVerify found that bot fraud was responsible for 65% of all fraud in CTV environments by 2024, with compromised devices simulating real user behavior to deceive measurement systems.
When a fake device can convincingly impersonate a living room viewer viewing premium inventory, the platform’s reported delivery numbers are unverified claims.
Blockchain’s pitch to advertisers in that environment is a receipt: an immutable record of what the system observed, linked to a verified identity and recorded at the time of delivery.
What blockchain cannot do on its own
A blockchain faithfully and permanently records input, but its reliability depends on the verification layer that precedes it.
If the identity verification layer is manipulated, the fraudulent identity will have the same permanent record as a legitimate one.
The hard problem is the oracle layer: confirming that the viewer was human before the record was written, that the device was legitimate, that the impression was visible, and that the downstream action was real.
World ID’s design separates evidence of personality from personal identity, allowing users to prove uniqueness without revealing their identity.
Advertising is a trust-sensitive use case, and combining human verification, ad targeting and wallet behavior into a single system will face regulatory and consumer scrutiny in markets where the collection of biometric data is actively challenged.
The adoption restriction is the third. Google, Meta, Amazon and the major CTV platforms control their own measurement systems and have little incentive to adopt a neutral, blockchain-based receiving layer that would weaken their grip on attribution.
Blockchain’s most practical path in the near term runs through markets where platform owners have an incentive to increase advertiser trust: crypto apps, independent CTV inventory, reward campaigns, wallet-based trading, and gaming.
There are two ways this develops
In the bull scenario, advertisers running high-value performance campaigns require verifiable logs as evidence that probabilistic measurements can no longer provide.
Blockchain verification can be integrated with existing ad stacks as a parallel audit trail for campaigns where the fraud risk justifies the additional infrastructure.
Juniper expects $172.3 billion in ad fraud losses by 2028, and diverting even 1% to 3% of that figure through verified evidence systems indicates a protected value pool of approximately $1.7 billion to $5.2 billion.
The Hakuhodo model scales across mainstream platforms, Spindl extends attribution beyond crypto-native apps, and the user never knows that the underlying infrastructure is a blockchain.
In the bear case, Google, Meta, and CTV platforms improve AI-based fraud detection quickly enough that the marginal value of a blockchain receiving layer remains small.
Regulations against biometric proof-of-human systems are slowing adoption of the authenticated attention model in key markets.
Blockchain advertising technology remains useful in crypto apps and high-fraud niche channels, but is failing to reach the programmatic mainstream.
The $162.4 billion US programmatic market continues to flow through the existing measurement stack, with fraud losses treated as an accepted line item.
AI has made fake behavior so cheap that detection systems can permanently lag behind in generating fraud. If advertisers conclude that probabilistic measurements can no longer be trusted, blockchain-proof systems are positioned to absorb that budget.