AdWords Became Google Ads in 2018. Here's What Actually Changed
Google renamed AdWords to Google Ads in 2018, as part of a broader rebrand across its advertising products. The rename was cosmetic, not functional: the same campaigns, the same billing, the same underlying auction system continued running under the new name. If you had an AdWords account before the change, it's the same account today, just relabeled.
Several related tools were renamed around the same period, which is worth knowing if you're piecing together old documentation, an old blog post, or a colleague's outdated habit of using the old terms.
| Old name | Current name |
|---|---|
| AdWords | Google Ads |
| AdWords Express | Smart campaigns (within Google Ads) |
| AdWords Editor | Google Ads Editor |
| AdWords API | Google Ads API |
This covers the products most relevant to click fraud specifically. Google renamed several other advertising and measurement products around the same time that aren't listed here.
Click Fraud Under the AdWords Name: A Short Real History
Click fraud isn't a new problem the rename left behind. It's been documented against Google's advertising products since at least the mid-2000s, back when AdWords was the only name the product had ever had.
In 2006, the SANS Institute reported that networks of compromised computers, what's now commonly called a botnet, were being used to click on pay-per-click ads at scale, generating fraudulent charges against advertisers. That's the same fundamental attack described throughout modern click fraud content today: automated clicks, at scale, designed to drain a budget without genuine buyer interest behind any of them.
A more thoroughly documented case followed a year later. Google's own security team published a technical case study on a botnet called Clickbot.A, which had infected over 100,000 machines specifically to commit click fraud against AdWords-era campaigns. We've covered that case in full technical detail elsewhere, since it's genuinely instructive for understanding how bot-driven click fraud has evolved since. Read the full breakdown of clicker bots and how detection catches them →
What's Actually Google-Ads-Specific About This
Most general click fraud content online, including some of the most established resources on the topic, covers the problem abstractly: bots, click farms, competitors, generically applied across every ad network and social platform. That's accurate as far as it goes, but it misses the mechanics specific to Google Ads that actually matter for detection and recovery.
Two Google Ads-specific pieces worth knowing exist, both inherited unchanged from the AdWords era: every click carries a unique identifier called a gclid, which ties a specific click back to a specific ad and campaign, and Google runs its own invalid-click detection and refund process that operates specifically within Google Ads, separate from whatever protections exist on other platforms.
Both of these are covered in real technical depth, including how a third-party protection layer actually uses them, in our main Google Ads click fraud guide. Read the full guide →
Where to Go for the Technical Depth
This page exists to answer one specific question: why does "AdWords" still show up in searches about a product that's been called Google Ads for years, and does that change anything about the underlying problem. It doesn't. If you're here because you're actually trying to understand or solve click fraud on your account, the genuinely deep content lives on three other pages:
The full Google Ads click fraud guide covers signs you're being hit, manual versus automated prevention, and the Google Click Quality refund process.
How click fraud software actually works breaks down device fingerprinting versus IP blocking in full technical detail, with a worked comparison table.
Google Ads clicker bots, explained covers exactly how bot-driven fraud gets caught, including the historical Clickbot.A case mentioned above.
Frequently asked questions.
Bottom line: click fraud protection isn't about blocking everything that looks unusual — it's about being precise. ClickPurity identifies the specific device behind a fraudulent click, not just its IP, so your budget reaches real buyers instead of bots and competitors.