Claims run on evidence. Build the file.

There are two ways to raise invalid clicks with Google, and only one of them goes anywhere.

The first is to describe a suspicion. Traffic looked odd, conversions dropped, the numbers felt wrong. It is honest, and it is unusable — nobody can review a feeling.

The second is to hand over a file. Timestamps. Source addresses and the kind of network they belong to. The campaign each click hit. The rule that fired, and why. What the session did after the click, or did not do. A cluster of clicks that clearly belong together, rather than a scattering of ones and twos.

The burden of proof sits with the advertiser. That is not unreasonable — Google is being asked to reverse a charge, and reversing charges on hunches would be a worse system for everybody. It does mean the quality of the file is most of the outcome.

Evidence cannot be collected retroactively

There is no export, no lookup, no way to reconstruct what a visitor did on your site three weeks ago if nothing was recording at the time. A tag starts the day it goes live and not a day earlier.

So the sequence is fixed, and it is worth being blunt about it:

1. 1.Today — the tag goes live and evidence starts accumulating.
2. 2.Then — clicks are flagged as they arrive, each with the reason attached.
3. 3.Later — read-only Google Ads access ties those flags to real spend, and we package the clusters into claims and file them.

Google reviews every claim and decides. There is no assurance that any individual claim is credited, and anyone telling you otherwise is describing a system that does not exist. What you can control is whether there is anything to file at all.