The term click farm first began to appear in the wake of the wider concept of BROKEN! (target document not found): click fraud, an expression used since the early 2000s to refer to the activity of clicking on website links for dishonest purposes. In its early days, click fraud related almost exclusively to the exploitation of pay-per-click advertising links, but now has other manifestations, such as the manipulation of popularity information as described above.

The term click farm first began to appear in the wake of the wider concept of BROKEN! (target document not found): click fraud, an expression used since the early 2000s to refer to the activity of clicking on website links for dishonest purposes. In its early days, click fraud related almost exclusively to the exploitation of pay-per-click advertising links, but now has other manifestations, such as the manipulation of popularity information as described above.