[codedokode]

It is obvious to me that third-party sites are motivated to employ every trick to increase ad views. Google cannot show ads to bots, because it will be a fraud, but a third-party site can because they are in a different country and you won't hold them responsible anyway.

[macNchz]

I’ve never run video ads on Google, but I have run a lot of search ads, and if the 3rd party sites where they show the videos are anything like the “search partners” network, you’re correct, the sites are total trash.

Several years ago I looked through our referrers and immediately disabled search partners for all of our ads when I saw the actual sites.

Many were just clones of the Google search results UI but with ads indistinguishable from search results. Their play is to buy ads on Google themselves, while showing partner network ads on their own confusing “search results” page. They arbitrage traffic by buying ads on cheaper keywords and then getting visitors to click a more expensive ad they serve by being in the partner network.

From what I saw, I can only imagine the vast majority of human clicks through these pages are totally unintentional or confused.