Systems and methods for discovery and tracking of obscured web-based advertisements

摘要

Systems and methods are provided for discovering advertisements on publisher web pages and for determining whether the advertisements are obscured by other content on the web pages. An advertisement tracking and discovery system may use web crawler applications to explore multiple publisher websites. The web crawler applications may gather advertisement data that includes information associated with detected advertisements, placement pathways by which the advertisements were placed on the publisher web pages, and obscuration information for the detected advertisements. Obscured advertisements that have been detected may be ignored during advertisement tracking and discovery operations or obscuration information may be stored and provided with other advertisement information for the obscured advertisements. The advertisement data may be aggregated and formatted to be provided to a user. The provided data may include advertisement screenshots and web page screenshots containing the advertisements.