Beginning in June of 2024 Triton Digital noticed some abnormal traffic patterns with the generic Dalvik User Agent, which caused an increase in downloads for a handful of news podcasts for publishers in their core geographic region. Our measurement and IVT teams immediately began in-depth investigations.
After extensive analysis and testing, we can definitively conclude that the issue originates from Google News and is specific to the Dalvik user agent (UA). We found that the downloads were spread across a surge of unique IPUA combinations on a variety of mobile devices, many of which had accessed the content prior to the spike. However, the volume of consumption for these IAB-defined listeners had surged substantially. The large number of downloads occur with new episodes only and are spread across a large number of listeners, at different times of day, and in different regions of the country. These patterns are similar to the patterns we saw prior to the download spike but in much larger numbers. This is why we have not labelled the activity as invalid traffic.
Our collaborative efforts with the Google News team to identify the cause on their side (possibly due to changes in their systems/platform) are ongoing, although we have experienced a similar lack of responsiveness and transparency as reported by James Cridland here: https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/odd-podcast-downloads/
Google has implemented a few changes to their systems, which have yielded no noticeable changes, and they have declined to provide detailed information about these modifications. While some of the download patterns appear to resemble normal user behaviour, the large spike in downloads that occurred across multiple news podcasts beginning on the same date raises questions about their validity.
Further investigation on our side is unnecessary as we are confident we have identified the source of the issue. Because of our role in the industry as a measurement provider, we have been removing this unusual traffic from the publishers affected in our public rankers until we have certainty on the cause from Google.
Until Google fixes the problem, however, there are some steps that publishers with Triton Digital can do to reduce and potentially eliminate the Dalvik download spikes:
Remove your podcast from Google News entirely.
Use Frequency Capping in TAP (if you are running ads) to adjust delivery to pre-spike levels.
In TAP flight targeting, block ad delivery on the Dalvik user agent. To do so, block the Android unspecified App user agent.
To save a few steps you can create a targeting template that excludes the Dalvik UA to use as a starting point when creating a new flight. We don’t recommend applying the template to existing flights because it will overwrite the targeting rules you have already added to the flight.
Use Stream Access Control to block the Dalvik user agent. Note that this could inadvertently exclude legitimate traffic.
We are committed to remaining the trusted source of podcast downloads for advertisers and the wider industry. We take this responsibility very seriously, and we will persist in removing these downloads from the affected publishers in our public rankers. This approach ensures we maintain the integrity of our reporting, despite the lack of a clear resolution from Google.
We welcome and encourage additional insights from Google into how their tech stack has changed in regards to their podcast delivery process, how that may affect Google News feeds, and the scenarios in which a user would (or would not) get a podcast download of the latest episode. This would help gain clarity for us and the podcast industry at large.
If you experience this issue you can try reaching out to the Google News team via audio-news-support@google.com.