Lunio, a company best known for filtering invalid clicks out of paid media campaigns, on November 12, 2026 announced a partnership with Revvim and the launch of Agentic Bid Optimization, a capability that automatically lowers bids on Google Search and Shopping when no other advertiser is competing for the same click. The technology belongs to Revvim, a Californian company founded in 2011. Lunio packages it inside its own contract, invoice and dashboard, and charges nothing up front: customers pay only out of what the system saves.

In Short

Lunio now sells a tool, built by Revvim, that drops brand search bids to a minimum when no competitor shows up in the Google auction and restores full bids when one does. It is aimed at advertisers who bid on their own brand name to keep rivals out and who may be paying defensive prices for clicks nobody else wanted. The fee is a share of the money saved, but neither the share nor the method used to measure savings is published.

What Lunio is selling

The announcement, published on Lunio's news page under the heading "Lunio & Revvim Partner to Launch Agentic Bid Optimization" and dated November 12, 2026, describes the product as "a new Lunio capability that automatically lowers your bids on Google Search and Shopping when nobody else is competing for the click."

The pitch rests on a familiar habit. Most brands buy their own name in paid search so that competitors cannot sit above their organic listing. According to Lunio, for much of the day nobody else is in those auctions, yet static or rules-based bids keep paying "the defensive price." Lunio calls the difference auction waste: spend on clicks that, in the company's words, "should cost a fraction of what you pay."

That framing is a deliberate extension of Lunio's core business. The company has made its name on invalid traffic, the bot and junk clicks that drain budgets without reaching a person. Agentic Bid Optimization, according to Lunio, "tackles the other side of wasted spend: overpaying for clicks that are real, but uncontested."

Chester Scott, Chief Strategy Officer at Lunio, put both products under one heading. "Our core mission is to reduce wasted ad spend for our customers, whether it's junk traffic coming from non-human sources or bidding against themselves," Scott said in the announcement. "By introducing Agentic Bid Optimization, we're creating a platform that helps advertisers reduce wasted ad spend and improve the incremental contribution of paid search in their media campaigns."

Matt LeBaron, Founder and CEO of Revvim, pointed to budgets. "In today's advertising environment, where budgets are tightening, every dollar counts. We're excited to partner with Lunio and put our technology in the hands of its customers. This gives them a smarter way to lower the cost of brand search and reinvest in growth."

How the system works

According to Lunio, the mechanism runs on two campaigns. When a competitor enters the auction, the advertiser's existing full-price campaign stays live and defends the top position. When nobody else is bidding, traffic moves to a low-bid campaign, and the advertiser pays "as little as the minimum bid for the same click."

Lunio's product page adds the plumbing. Google Ads scripts maintain a negative keyword list and a low-bid companion campaign, and every change appears in the account's change history. The page says the system runs alongside Smart Bidding, Performance Max and existing campaigns. That explains a line in the announcement that might otherwise look contradictory: there are "no campaigns to rebuild," because the original campaigns are left alone while a companion campaign is added beside them.

Timing is described loosely. The announcement says the system "monitors your auctions continuously and reacts within the hour," and the product page says the full-price campaign typically returns within the hour when a competitor reappears. Revvim's own page for AdAi, the patented system behind the product, is more precise, giving an average response time of 8 minutes and 45 seconds for high-volume terms and 35 minutes for low-volume terms.

Reclaimed spend is reported monthly in the Lunio dashboard, next to the company's traffic protection figures. "One contract, one invoice, one dashboard," the announcement says.

The onboarding path, as Lunio describes it

The announcement lists what Lunio needs before the system goes live. According to Lunio, the process has five stages:

  1. Access. The company asks for "Standard access to your Google Ads account, plus Google Search Console access." Standard is one of the user access levels in a Google Ads account, and Search Console is Google's reporting service for site owners, which shows how a site performs in organic results.
  2. Scope. The advertiser and Lunio reach "Agreement on which campaigns and terms are in scope." The announcement adds: "Brand terms are usually the place to start."
  3. Learning period. The system then runs for "a learning period of at least seven days."
  4. Day 10 review. Lunio reviews results with the customer at day 10.
  5. Day 30 review. A second review follows at day 30.

On cost, the announcement is short: "There's no upfront cost. You only pay on savings." The product page says customers are billed a share of the reclaimed spend on their Lunio invoice and pay nothing if nothing is saved. Neither page names the percentage.

The numbers behind the claim

The announcement cites one result. "One online food delivery leader reclaimed over $6.4 million in ad spend in 2025, with 76% lower CPC across 15 brand terms," according to Lunio, which attributes the savings to "brands already using Revvim's technology." The client is not named.

Revvim's case study for the same client splits that sentence in two. It lists more than $6.4 million in reclaimed ad spend, a 76% reduction in CPC and a 1% increase in impression share as 2025 results, and separately says that isolating empty auctions pushed CPC to the minimum across 15 high-volume brand terms. It does not tie the 76% figure to those 15 terms. According to the case study, an analysis of 2025 data found that 31% of the brand's traffic was uncontested. No baseline, control group or method for the $6.4 million is given.

Figure Client or scope Source Period
Over $6.4 million reclaimed ad spend Unnamed online food delivery leader Lunio announcement; Revvim case study 2025
76% lower CPC Same client Lunio announcement; Revvim case study 2025
CPC at the minimum on 15 high-volume brand terms Same client Revvim case study 2025
31% of brand traffic uncontested Same client Revvim case study 2025 data
1% increase in impression share Same client Revvim case study 2025
More than $240,000 freed Unnamed EV manufacturer Lunio product page, citing Revvim customer data Six months, dates not given
42% lower brand CPC at peak Unnamed premium jewellery brand, UK Lunio product page, citing Revvim customer data Not given
Around 30% of defensive search budget unlocked Average, base not given Lunio product page, citing Revvim customer data Not given

The product page carries its own caveat beneath those figures: results vary by account.

What Revvim charges when it sells directly

Lunio has not published its rate. Revvim has, for customers who buy AdAi directly, and the schedule gives a sense of the economics, though nothing in the announcement says Lunio uses the same terms. According to Revvim's AdAi page, there is no setup cost or retainer, and the fee is tiered on spend reclaimed in each calendar month.

Monthly reclaimed spend (Revvim direct) Fee on that band
First $10,000 25%
$10,000.01 to $100,000 20%
$100,000.01 to $1,000,000 15%
Above $1,000,000 10%
Example: $50,000 reclaimed in a month $10,500, or 21% (PPC Land calculation)

Why an empty auction can still cost money

Lunio's argument assumes that an advertiser alone in an auction keeps paying a price set by its own high bid. Google's documentation describes the mechanics differently, and the gap between the two accounts is not addressed in the announcement.

According to Google's help page on actual cost-per-click, an advertiser pays only what is minimally required to clear the Ad Rank thresholds and beat the ad ranked immediately below. With no competitor below, the advertiser pays the reserve price. Google's page on Ad Rank thresholds says those thresholds are set dynamically in each auction, based on ad quality, ad position, user signals such as location and device type, and the topic of the search. Thresholds are typically higher for ads above search results, and Google acknowledges that an ad can be relatively expensive even when no other ad appears below it. The advertiser's own maximum CPC bid feeds into Ad Rank, but it is not named among the factors that set the thresholds.

On that reading, a lone advertiser should already be paying something close to the reserve. Revvim's published results suggest otherwise in practice. An Adthena customer using the Revvim-powered product, according to Adthena's November 2025 announcement, saw CPC fall from about $0.13 to $0.02 to $0.03 within a quarter while search impression share stayed near 100%. Neither Lunio nor Revvim explains which part of Google's pricing produces the saving, and Google is not a party to the announcement.

Not Revvim's first distribution deal

Lunio is not the first company to resell this capability. On November 4, 2025, Adthena announced Brand Activator Premium, a product powered by Revvim that swaps in a low-bid version of the same ad at Google's minimum bid when no competitors appear and extends to Shopping ads. Adthena said at the time that the approach saved brands around 30% of branded budgets on average across hundreds of brands, and that the two companies together covered more than $5 billion in annual Google Ads spend and more than 600 clients.

Revvim itself is older than the trend it now rides. According to its leadership page, LeBaron founded the company in 2011 after roles at CatalogCity.com and Shop.com, and the team built and patented AdAi in 2020. The page says the system onboarded more than $5 billion in annual Google Ads spend in its first two years. AdAi was designed first to stop what Revvim calls cannibalistic ads, which push an advertiser's own top organic listing down the page when no competitor is present, with low-bid alternate ads as an option.

That origin matters for a reading of the label. The word "agentic" in the product name implies software that takes a goal and acts on it without human sign-off, which is how PPC Land's explainer defines agentic AI. The announcement describes continuous monitoring and automated campaign switching through scripts; it does not mention a language model, and the underlying patent dates from 2020.

Lunio's widening definition of waste

PPC Land has followed Lunio's research through 2026, and almost all of it has concerned fake clicks rather than overpriced real ones. In June, the company reported that LinkedIn produced the highest share of invalid clicks per ad dollar, 17.62% in the first quarter of 2026, from a sample of 64 million clicks. In July came a banking study putting annual losses at about $295,000 on a $5 million budget, followed by a survey of 131 marketers in which only 5.3% used a dedicated invalid traffic platform.

In August, Lunio found that retailers on AI Max saw invalid traffic rise from 2.46% to 5.28% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, across more than 414 million clicks. In October, its education study reported that campaigns bidding on rival brand names faced 9.3% invalid clicks, against 4.7% for generic campaigns. The company's $63 billion global estimate was challenged the same month when ad fraud researcher Augustine Fou argued that it undercounts fraud on CPM-priced ads.

The new product moves Lunio from the question of whether a click is real to the question of what a real click should cost. Is that still the same business? Scott's quote suggests Lunio thinks so.

Brand search under pressure

The timing coincides with a run of changes to how Google handles brand queries. On November 8, PPC Land reported that Google's own documentation now says Performance Max may filter out brand and navigational searches in favour of dedicated Search campaigns; the same article cited a Haus analysis from August 2024 in which excluding brand terms lowered acquisition costs by an average of 40%. In June, Google added branded search controls inside AI Max, with three options, the strictest of which Google itself describes as highly restrictive. Those settings followed the brand exclusions Google introduced for Performance Max in February 2024.

Costs have been rising throughout. Channable data covering 1.38 billion euros of spend from more than 10,000 advertisers showed CPCs up 15% year over year, and PPC Land's October analysis of how Google optimises its own revenue noted a WordStream median CPC of $5.42, against $2.32 in 2016. Google has also widened what advertisers can see about invalid activity, publishing documentation for an Invalid Activity Credit Report in June that covers Search and Performance Max only.

For brand search, the old argument has always been about incrementality: whether paid clicks on a brand name produce sales that organic results would not have delivered anyway. Revvim and Lunio do not settle that argument. They offer a narrower proposition, which is that when no rival is present, the price of a defensive click can be pushed toward the floor without giving up the slot.

What the announcement does not say

Lunio does not disclose its share of savings, the method or baseline used to calculate "reclaimed" spend, the markets where the product is available, or whether Microsoft Advertising is supported. It does not say how the system detects an uncontested auction or what it does with Search Console data, and it does not address how the approach fits Google's documented reserve-price rules. The 76% figure is presented differently in the announcement and in Revvim's case study.

Key facts

  • Announcement: "Lunio & Revvim Partner to Launch Agentic Bid Optimization," Lunio news page, category "AI & automation," dated November 12, 2026
  • Product name: Agentic Bid Optimization, "powered by Revvim"
  • Underlying technology: Revvim AdAi, built and patented in 2020, according to Revvim
  • Platforms: Google Search and Google Shopping
  • Mechanism: full-price campaign when a competitor is present; low-bid companion campaign at as little as the minimum bid when none is; Google Ads scripts and a negative keyword list, per Lunio's product page
  • Reaction time: "within the hour" (Lunio); average 8 minutes 45 seconds for high-volume and 35 minutes for low-volume terms (Revvim AdAi page)
  • Requirements: Standard access to the Google Ads account, Google Search Console access, agreed scope (brand terms usually first)
  • Learning period: at least seven days; reviews at day 10 and day 30
  • Pricing: no upfront cost; share of reclaimed spend billed on the Lunio invoice; percentage not disclosed
  • Spokespeople quoted: Chester Scott, Chief Strategy Officer, Lunio; Matt LeBaron, Founder and CEO, Revvim
  • Cited result: over $6.4 million reclaimed in 2025 by an unnamed online food delivery company (Revvim customer data)
  • Earlier Revvim distribution deal: Adthena Brand Activator Premium, announced November 4, 2025
  • Product page: https://www.lunio.ai/solutions/agentic-bid-optimization

Timeline

Summary

Who: Lunio, a company that filters invalid clicks from paid media campaigns, and Revvim, a California company founded by Matt LeBaron in 2011 whose AdAi technology powers the product. Chester Scott, Lunio's Chief Strategy Officer, and LeBaron are quoted.

What: A partnership and the launch of Agentic Bid Optimization, which moves brand traffic to a low-bid campaign when no competitor is in the Google auction and back to the full-price campaign when one returns. Customers pay a share of reclaimed spend, with no upfront cost and an undisclosed rate.

When: The announcement is dated November 12, 2026. Onboarding involves a learning period of at least seven days and reviews at day 10 and day 30.

Where: Google Search and Google Shopping campaigns, run through Google Ads scripts alongside existing campaigns, with results reported in the Lunio dashboard. Markets are not specified.

Why: Lunio argues that brands bidding on their own names pay defensive prices for clicks they would win anyway. The product extends the company's definition of wasted spend from fake clicks to overpriced real ones, at a time when Google is changing how Performance Max and AI Max treat brand queries and CPCs keep rising.