Google used AI to removed or restricted almost half of billion ads in the financial services segment in 2024

Google has been using AI to crack down on advertising fraud, meeting a key demand from banks and politicians to bear down on scam accounts, according to Finextra. „In 2024, we blocked or removed 415 million ads and suspended over 5 million accounts for violating our ads policies most closely associated with scams.” – the company said.

Since the early days of the internet, Google has been battling sophisticated scammers using everchanging techniques in attempts to game the company’s systems, and 2024 was no exception.

According to the Google Ads Safety Report: „One industry-wide trend that emerged was the rise of public figure impersonation ads – bad actors using AI-generated imagery or audio to imply an affiliation with a celebrity to promote a scam. To fight back, we quickly assembled a dedicated team of over 100 experts to analyze these scams and develop effective countermeasures, such as updating our Misrepresentation policy to suspend advertisers that promote these scams. As a result, we were able to permanently suspend over 700,000 offending advertiser accounts. This led to a 90% drop in reports of this kind of scam ad last year.”

The search giant says it suspended 39.2 million advertiser accounts in the US alone in 2024 — more than triple the number from the previous year.

Overall, the company removed almost half a billion ads related to scams.

„Bad actors constantly adapt their tactics to evade detection, making policy enforcement an always-on endeavor. While our earlier machine learning models required vast datasets for training, our latest Large Language Models (LLMs) operate much more efficiently. They need only a fraction of the information earlier models needed to quickly recognize emerging threats, identify patterns of abuse, and distinguish legitimate businesses from scams. This agility is key to combating diverse, rapidly-evolving threats at scale.

Last year, we continued to invest heavily in making our LLMs more advanced than ever, launching over 50 enhancements to our models which enabled more efficient and precise enforcement at scale. Prioritizing these technical advancements allows our teams to focus on more complex, ambiguous problems, which in turn provides our LLMs with nuanced training data to better address these instances in the future.” – Google stated.

More details here: Google – Ads Safety Report 2024