Google's new algorithm is just robbing me

I’ve been running a campaign for years. It has a daily budget that typically leaves a little headroom, with around 5% of impressions lost due to budget. It uses Target CPA bidding.

Until today, the average CPC was around $2, and the highest bid it had ever placed was $5.

This morning, it's paying up to $20 per click, which is above the target CPA. Across six clicks, the average CPC is $6.27, higher than the previous highest bid.

Nothing in the account has changed.

The new algorithm is bidding ridiculous amounts, and I don’t know how to stop it short of pausing the campaign. How can it bid more than 100% of the target CPA when it knows the conversion rate for that keyword may only be 10–20%.

Is there any way to cap the bids or bring them under control?

Target CPA bidding is a nnightmare unfortunately.. have you tried to stop the campaign, wait 3 days, relaunch it for 1 day, stop it again for 3 days, and relaunch it again?

What "They" not tell you....big siotes and media news sites who dominate google, send spy bots to your site to generate click fraud , a crime but these people not dace a jail. They create click fraud and fake traffic and you have to pay, but you not get any results.

Cloudflare has a good feature to stop these bots , maybe add some more in your robots.txt. Use duckduckgo search "google ads click fraud" or similar phraes. Better not be in a niche who is conquered by these big sites.