According to the Media Ratings Council, ‘General Invalid Traffic’ or GIVT, consists of traffic identified through routine means of filtration executed through the application of lists or with other standardised parameter checks. These may include:

• Known invalid data-centre traffic (determined to be a consistent source of invalid traffic, not including routing artefacts of legitimate users or virtual machine legitimate browsing);
• Bots and spiders or other crawlers1 (except those noted in the ‘Sophisticated Invalid Traffic’ category);
• Activity-based filtration using transaction-level data and parameters from campaign or application data;
• Non-browser user-agent headers or other forms of unknown browsers;
• Pre-fetch or browser pre-rendered traffic (where associated ads were not subsequently accessed by a valid user;
  Note: updated IAB/MRC Measurement Guidelines require an ad to have loaded and begun to render in order to record an impression; as a result, prefetch or pre-rendered traffic shall not be included in Gross impression counts );
• Invalid placements (specific to ads); small, barely visible or invisible ad delivery or illogical (non-industry standard) ad size of 0x0 and 1×1 either declared or as delivered on the client side; andNon-rendering capabilities; sessions or traffic without the capability to render or display images (other than cases of disabled image rendering) even though rendered impressions or other activity may be associated with them such as headless browsers or component devices without a display component. This does not relate to and is agnostic of the visibility or viewability of an ad.