AdProtektor vs Ads Lighthouse in 2026: Click-fraud protection vs brand-search ad evidence

AdProtektor is a traffic-protection product for advertisers receiving paid visits from Google Ads or Meta. It assigns a persistent identity to a browser on a device and combines device, behavioural, and network signals when assessing a visit. Its labels include Real, Crawler, Bot, Competitor, and Click Farm, but the documentation correctly frames those labels as assessments, not proof of a visitor’s identity or intent. The useful operational work is reviewing evidence, tuning rules, and controlling false positives rather than treating a dashboard label as a final verdict.

The enforcement route depends on the platform. Eligible blocked Google Ads IP addresses can be written to an account or selected campaigns, with an exclusion log. For Meta, eligible blocked visitors can be maintained in a Custom Audience that the advertiser applies as a campaign exclusion. Those delivery paths are valuable, but they remain distinct from the platform’s own matching and processing. ConversionOS can also deliver eligible, deduplicated conversion events to Meta Pixel and Conversions API, Google Ads, and GA4, though it is separately priced as an add-on to fraud protection.

Standard is $84 per month for one domain, 5,000 monthly clicks, one seat, seven-day replays, and 30-day fraud evidence. Pro is the working upgrade when AI Person Analysis, more domains, longer retention, or higher volume is needed. It is not a brand-search monitoring system: it cannot tell you which domain appeared beside a brand term in a chosen city and device. Buy it only where a team will actually investigate traffic quality and act on the resulting records.

Ads Lighthouse monitors paid results for the exact keywords, locations, devices, and schedule a project defines. It checks Google and Bing search ads on every plan, with sponsored Google Shopping observations available from Growth. A saved observation retains the search context, advertiser domain, ad copy, and destination, creating a useful record when a brand team needs to investigate an affiliate, coupon site, competitor, or unfamiliar advertiser appearing on an important term.

Its policy workflow is its reason to choose it over a generic ad library. Teams can identify affiliate URL parameters, leave unfamiliar IDs visible for review, open policy cases, evaluate rules against saved ads and destinations, and trace eligible destinations server-side. Alerts can be delivered by email, Slack incoming webhook, or webhook JSON. Observed visibility is the share of saved monitored searches where a domain appeared, not Google Ads impression share, spend, proof of a purchased keyword, or proof that an infringement occurred.

Starter costs $49 per month for one project, 20 keywords, two locations, 7,500 scheduled checks, and 100 on-demand checks. Growth adds Shopping at $99, while Scale at $299 adds REST API access, API keys, and white-label reports. This is a monitoring allowance model, so a high-frequency multi-market programme must be planned before activation. Ads Lighthouse does not inspect suspicious traffic after a click and cannot submit Google IP exclusions or maintain Meta exclusion audiences.