How many times does this happen to you? You’re browsing a site, one that seems fairly safe and innocent, in search of a file. You see what appears to be the legitimate download link, so you click it. But that redirects you to a completely different site that’s obviously advertising at best, malware at worst. Or said button downloads something on your computer that is definitely not the file you needed. Annoying, right?

Google agrees. So much so, that the company is adjusting its Safe Browsing feature in Chrome to warn users about sites that use deceptive content—like buttons that don’t lead to what you’d expect them to, or prompts that suggest you should click on them when you really shouldn’t.

“Consistent with the social engineering policy we announced(Opens in a new window) in November, embedded content (like ads) on a web page will be considered social engineering when they either: pretend to act, or look and feel, like a trusted entity — like your own device or browser, or the website itself. [Or] try to trick you into doing something you’d only do for a trusted entity — like sharing a password or calling tech support,” Google said in a blog post(Opens in a new window).

Websites that “consistently” make use of these irritating practices run the risk of having themselves flagged, which means that Chrome will throw up a huge, red warning page that prevents you from entering the affected website unless you absolutely agree that you’re comfortable doing so. 

In November, Google tweaked its Safe Browsing feature to better help users stay protected from potential social engineering attacks on websites—like, for example, when a website insists that you should call some kind of number because it has detected that you have all sorts of viruses on your computer.

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