Probably not — and if they are, it is likely costing you less than you think. Deliberate clicking by a competitor is the first explanation most advertisers reach for when a campaign underperforms, and it is one of the least common actual causes. That does not mean it never happens. It means checking properly is worth more than assuming, and this is how to check.
Why it is rarer than it feels
Three practical reasons, none of them about anyone's good character.
Google already catches the obvious version. Repeated clicks from one IP, in a short window, on the same ad, is the single easiest pattern in the world to detect, and it is precisely what Google's invalid-click systems were built for. Those clicks get filtered and credited back automatically, often before you would ever notice them. A competitor manually clicking your ad a few times a day is mostly wasting their own afternoon.
The economics are poor for them. Draining a meaningful share of a competitor's daily budget by hand requires a genuinely tedious amount of clicking, every day, forever, with no direct benefit to their own account.
Most underperformance has duller causes. Broad match pulling in unrelated searches, a landing page that does not match the ad, a bidding strategy optimising toward form fills rather than sales. These are unglamorous and they explain far more wasted spend than sabotage does.
How to actually check
In Google Ads, add the Invalid clicks and Invalid click rate columns to your campaign view. They are off by default, which is why most advertisers have never looked at them. This shows what Google already caught and did not charge you for.
Then look for the pattern that actually indicates a person rather than a bot: clicks concentrated during business hours, from a small number of IP addresses, on your highest-value keywords specifically, with no other bot signals (see how to tell if your Google Ads clicks are real). A competitor behaves like a human because they are one — which, ironically, is why automated detection struggles with them and why the volume is usually too low to matter.
Server logs on your landing page will show you repeat visits from the same IP far more clearly than Google Ads will. If one address keeps arriving from your ads and never converts, over weeks, you have something concrete.
A caution worth taking seriously. An IP address is not a person. Everyone in one office building, on one mobile network cell, or behind one ISP's shared connection can share an address. We have seen advertisers block an IP in anger and cut off a genuine corporate customer whose whole staff sat behind it. Be as confident about who you are excluding as you would want someone to be about you.
What genuinely stops it
Report it to Google. Free, and their invalid-traffic team has visibility across accounts that you do not. Provide dates, campaigns and IPs if you have them. Realistic expectations matter here — see what an invalid click refund actually covers.
Exclude the IP. This is the only mechanism that prevents the next click rather than reclaiming the last one. Google Ads supports IP exclusions at campaign level; the practical mechanics and the limit you will eventually run into are covered in IP exclusion for bot traffic.
Stop bidding where it is easy to hurt you. If someone is targeting one expensive keyword, the cost of defending it may exceed its value. Reallocating budget is sometimes the rational answer rather than the defeat it feels like.
The response that helps regardless of who is clicking
Here is the part that changes the framing. If your bidding is optimising toward form submissions, then every click — fraudulent, curious or genuine — is judged by whether it filled in a form, and a competitor clicking without submitting simply looks like a bad click among many.
If your bidding optimises toward customers who actually paid, the picture changes. Fake and low-quality clicks stop influencing where Google spends your money, because they never produce the outcome the algorithm is learning from. You are not blocking the bad traffic; you are making it irrelevant to the decisions your budget follows.
That requires reporting real outcomes back to Google Ads, which is what offline conversion imports are for and what Claudphic Ads does automatically when a lead is marked Won. It is a slower fix than blocking an IP and a considerably more durable one, because it works against every kind of bad click at once, including the kinds nobody has thought of yet.