Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real.

The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre patterns I saw and the off-the-record conversations I had with ad tech insiders. It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants to talk about because the whole system is propped up by it.

I'm curious if other developers, founders, or marketers here have seen similar discrepancies in their own data.

It’s interesting that this matches _exactly_ the ChatGPT writing style. There’s clearly some human data and work behind, but the entire article has the usual “it’s not just X, it’s …”, bold emphasis on specific words, bullet points, and probably more that I’m just subconsciously picking up.

Nothing wrong with using ChatGPT for help of course, I just found it interesting and kind of ironic given the contents of the article. It would be even more interesting if this was the actual writing style of the author, since this must be what ChatGPT was fine tuned to adhere to. Is it the predominant style of communication in adtech?

I did work in the ad tech industry for almost 15y and big corp like Google/FB scam their user:

- they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers

- if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range

- and for most of the traffic they might send you, they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic. So they get this "amazing" performance by claiming people that would have bought on your site anyway

I have seen and been working in companies trying do to the impact metrics well, but these are outliers

- websites showing ads are annoying their user and get no benefit of it

- stores/brands/people that want to advert pays a bug chunk of money for nothing - only the middle men are getting benefits

I’m puzzled by this: I thought it was well-understood, at least in the industry, that traffic numbers were at least mostly nonsense, and that ad click metrics especially were suuuper shady, typically more than half fraud; yet OP, in the business of “accurate ad spend analytics”, only just discovered this!?

It just doesn’t ring true. That aspect of the story isn’t novel at all, and someone in that line of work should surely have known all this, right?

Now the section on categorising different bot patterns, that’s more interesting, and I haven’t seen so much said about it.

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why?

Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught.

A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistication than most companies have. And are they really going to pay some shady outfit to do it for them? It seems unlikely?

An ad agency? It will quickly become obvious that you are getting crap return on your spend, so that seems unlikely as well.

Someone else? What is their motivation?

Would like to see the script. From reading it's impossible to tell if the methodology is sound. Would legitimate users with adblockers or disabling JS get counted is false positives, for example?

That said, 73% doesn't come as a surprise. If anything I expect it to be higher.

I guess this quote sums up the situation

> When I tried to bring this up with a few major ad platforms, the conversation always followed a predictable script. The sales reps were incredibly friendly until I mentioned click fraud or bot traffic. Then, the tone shifted instantly to corporate-speak: "Our AI detection is industry leading" and "We take ad fraud very seriously." It was a polite but firm wall, a clear signal to stop asking questions.

> One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."

Nothing new here, nothing surprising.

Wayyyy back in 2000 I ran ad ops for Lycos which included a ton of other sites that they had acquired. We did an audit that uncovered the fact that 25-75% of traffic/pageviews/visitors/ad impressions were due to bots. We did our best at the moment to block some more of them, but it was losing game then, as now.

Advertising, especially online advertising, is a largely a waste of money. Overall, it's obsolete and while it may generate what seems like economic activity, it's a net loss as a use of our time and money.

Interesting. You didn’t give specifics on what anti-bot measures sites implemented, so I’ll add:

Bot prevention measures can be good, but the more hoops you make your users jump though (CAPTCHA etc), the more legitimate users will drop off. Those have significant impacts on conversion rates.

I would think fixing this should involve the analytics and attribution side rather than adding friction to your e commerce flow.

Especially as bot tech continues to get better and more indistinguishable from real traffic.

  After we implemented advanced bot traffic detection and filtering, their reported traffic plummeted by 71%. [...]
  But then the sales report came in. Their actual sales went up by 34%.
  Their real conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts had been working all along, but the results were buried under an avalanche of fake clicks. They were not bad at marketing; they were just spending thousands of dollars advertising to robots programmed never to buy anything. Their marketing ROI went from "terrible" to "excellent" overnight.

Can you just tell e.g. Google Ads that you don't want to pay for certain clicks?

Did they modify their targeting to try to avoid bots?

I remember reading an article years ago that argued with similar examples that the entire website ad market is almost entirely artificial/fraud/bots, but that a lot of jobs, a lot of companies, and basically the whole industry depends on simply pretending this is not true.

For any real audit of website traffic (M&A, large advertising deals, etc), you typically don't rely on self reported statistics, but rather 3rd parties (e.g. SimilarWeb). These have actual spywares on top of Google analytics plug-ins to correlate real traffic from noise

Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0] from its stats and analytics?

I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic.

[0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views

This is what frustrated me when I worked in e-commerce. They are blessed with the highest-quality signal ever – the purchase – but it's generated very rarely for anyone who is not Alibaba or Amazon.

I feel like this was known years ago, but never gained traction. Here is a 2022 article in wired about bots.

https://www.wired.com/story/bots-online-advertising/

And before that, in the 2010s, an employee of ebay discovered the perverse incentives of online advertising. Freakonomics did a podcast on the subject. It is a two parter, but really worth your time if you want to get some of the behind the scenes thoughts and machinations of the advertising industry.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

Ads have been around for a long time. If your great-...-grandpa bought a newspaper ad in 1820 he would have been looking to see if the ad worked (back then 90+% of people were farmers who didn't buy ads, but lets assume you had an ancestor then who was a shopkeeper and thus had potential value in ads). He probably didn't have have modern statistics, but he would pay attention to sales and try to figure out how much value the ad generated. (or he liked the guy who ran the newspaper and wanted to buy anyway...

If you are running ads you should be running statistics on them. You should know that you spent $X on ads, and got $Y on sales. This despite how messy the data is (Car manufactures want you to buy a new car every 3 years, so most ads are buy in the future not today - which makes getting answers hard). What matters isn't engagement, clicks, or any other data analysis can give you - they are (or trying to be) a proxy for what matters: how did advertisements affect sales. There are other ways to get that data, those ways have long been known. You shouldn't ignore them - if only to verify that that analysis is still working.

I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap. Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who was running the bots?

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly, bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that in 2025".

It's definitely better to know what traffic is real for many reasons, however won't clicks just lower the value of a click and conversion numbers, but leave overall conversion the same?

If conversion rate drops 90%, the value of a click should also drop 90% as companies adjust the bids for ads.

I'm sure this isn't always true in practice and it takes time for bids to adjust. I'm just wondering how much impact this actually has.

And on the other side, if ad companies were better at filtering bots, their clicks become more valuable and companies should be willing to pay more.

Good read, but worth keeping in mind the conflict of interest here - the author's company sells bot-detection tools.

The overall point stands, yet the specific "73% fake traffic" figure should be taken with caution until independent data backs it up.

Can you share the script you made for this analysis?

The other side of this is apparently also true: LLMs Reproduce Human Purchase Intent via Semantic Similarity Elicitation of Likert Ratings - https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08338

Is there a market for software that will use whatever tools are available to detect human users from bots and thereby gain some "real" metrics?

Because I could probably write that, and I'm currently (mostly) on the bench

EDIT: It seems that people actually reject this filtering for business-incentive reasons. Well here's what I propose: In order to get out of this "debt", we "pay it off" at some rate. So for example, every week we subtract an additional 1% of the traffic detected as "fake", in order to hopefully get back to some real numbers at some point

Please note the site this appears on, `joindatacops.com` is selling an analytics product? So this is presumably marketing copy about how their product can do better at filtering bots?

"First-party Web Analytics That Powers CRM: Stop losing leads to blockers, bots, and fake clicks. DataCops gives your CRM the real customer journey."

I run a survey product for ecommerce stores [1]

A lot of our customers use post purchase surveys and on-site surveys to help with this sort of thing. For example a really common use-case is an attribution survey which appears after a sale is made. The survey will ask something like "how did you hear about us?" which helps determine what actually drove the sale so they can get some clear insights outside of Google and Meta. It's not perfectly reliable but it's an additional data point that helps with the mess out there...

[1] https://www.zigpoll.com/

Since we're talking about bot detection, any library or service recommendations?

I know of fingerprint.js which is semi open source but I have never tried them out. Any feedback?

If your site sells your own product, why does it have third-party ads? They just distract from your own product. Yet apparently they attract click bots.

Is he paying for inbound traffic? To whom? Clearly they're not delivering.

“I spoke to a startup founder who raised $2 million in funding based on "user growth" metrics that he later discovered were 80% bots. He is now trapped, forced to pretend everything is fine because admitting the truth could jeopardize his company and his relationship with his investors.”

If you feel trapped now, just wait until you're in prison!

I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to marketing and business influencers.

Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked" enough to look real.

Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from your traffic being fake?

You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely)

You pay other publishing networks (maybe adsense?) and the website owners profit from sending fake traffic (maybe true? if the article were really trying to make a case for this, just name them?)

Or, you work inside a company and just want to make your department look good?

I'm not sure I know what the point of this article is besides a click bait title.

Just tell me exactly what the mechanism is for this fake traffic- don't hint at some kind of conspiracy.

What I don't get, why are there not some companies bypassing Google and Co. and just pay the website owners directly? That would save a bunch of money for both sides and I don't think placing some old-school GIFs is that much less annoying for the website visitors, so that it would be less effective.

We ran into this problem when running ads for an iOS App only to iOS traffic. Somehow 80% of our iOS only targeted traffic clickthrough was Android... Went to UGC and never looked back.

> This is the hidden bot economy.

I still have to hear a compelling argument about why I should use computers “by hand” and ignore these powerful tools. Price checking, comparison shopping, buy when released for sale… All of these things point me to using bots.

This feels a lot less like “fraud” and a lot more like “the world has moved on”. Maybe it’s time to route traffic that looks like bots to a bot-optimized shopping experience.

I'm not a big fan of AI, but if it kills off online advertising and marketting, maybe there's a silver lining...

Why is this in the least surprising? It's just the natural successor to what everyone used to do with the trade magazines thirty years ago. Back then you filled in a profile questionnaire to get a free subscription, so every basement hacker turned into the manager of a 500-person division with control of a $1m capital budget. The magazine didn't want to check because it would damage the demographic numbers that they pitched to advertisers. The advertisers knew that there was some liar's poker being played but everyone just rolled with it.

Would be great if more data were made available by OP to peer review some of this. That said, making money with failure starts looking like a business model - highly unethical. Why make customers succeed when you loose money doing so.

I'm not sure... but... maybe in this one single instance, I'm rooting for the bots.

I mean, it's burning ad dollars and causing advertisers to rethink their strategy. Who knows, maybe that will eventually lead to the realization that web pages that are 20% content and 80% ads are just luring bots and not customers.

On the other hand, the money being burnt is going to Google, Meta, etc... and helping fund massive surveillance infrastructure. To be honest, I'd prefer it if it all just went to shareholders. Heh, maybe that'll be the sign that we've hit peak surveillance infrastructure: Google and Meta dividend payments go up :-)

But I have trouble sympathizing with someone who writes this:

> Mouse Movements: Did the cursor move in natural, human-like arcs, or did it snap between points?

> Scrolling Patterns: Was the scrolling speed variable, with pauses and upward scrolls, or was it a perfectly smooth, mechanical glide?

> Time Between Interactions: How long did a "user" wait between clicking a link, hovering over an image, or adding an item to the cart?

I read that as: "We're tracking every movement, every hesitation... so that we can feed it to our models and determine how best to keep you addicted".

I knew it was happening, and I know I'm editorializing there... but they are getting closer and closer to just coming out and saying it.

edit: Added newlines in quoted part.

It makes the argument of the open internet being unable to function without advertising, quite hard to prop up. Especially when over 70% of traffic if just people gaming the system, to real users detriment.

We had vibe coding. Now we have vibe engineering. Next stop, vibe faking.

Perhaps this will eventually lead them to give up on spying on users altogether.

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I just run into this:

The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory which asserts that since around 2016 the Internet has consisted mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, as part of a coordinated and intentional effort to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Am I the only one who thinks that websites shouldn't even be able to see a users mouse movement or scrolling?

Who is profiting from the ad fraud?

I find the article's topic interesting, but the writing style is just... no. It reads like a True Crime transcript or really bad marketing copy. Which makes a certain kind of sense, I guess.

The lies contained in advertising, now fueled by the lies about the viewership of advertising, prop up much of the modern economy.

Advertising: it's lies all the way down.

This is news? The whole idea of allowing low-trust countries access to the internet makes little sense.

Cue the "always has been" meme

> scraping 70 million retailer web pages every single day. This is a legitimate and massive source of automated traffic.

Why do they do this? For vital business intelligence. Major retailers like Amazon do not always notify vendors when they run out of stock. So, brands pay for data scraping services to monitor their own products. These "good bots" check inventory levels, see who is winning the "buy box," ensure product descriptions are correct, and track search result rankings. They even scrape from different locations and mobile device profiles to analyze what banner ads are being shown to different audiences.

_---------------_

Guilty as charged. You quickly learn to bypass bot detection measures and create a fully automated system to gather all this information just because amazon doesn't provide it in an accessible manner causing harm to businesses who need this intel and their own internet infra.

Does author suggesting that META or Google are building these bots to fake traffic? They are the one's making money from it.

I wouldn't understand what would be motivation of anyone else to create these bots to click on ad's on facebook. It must be the advertising's company.

Bots everywhere

Not really surprised. I spend a ridiculous amount on time banning bots every week.

Conversion rates have almost always been in the 1% or less range for a significant number of advertisers on the web and I've been ranting about how absurd this is for decades at this point.

I sincerely wish we could get past this phase of advertising... imagine any other product where you're trying to extract money from 1% by annoying 99% of your audience. We don't have to tolerate this, and many aren't anymore (thanks to ad blockers)

> I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior.

> This was not the obvious spam that gets filtered out. This was sophisticated bot traffic designed to fool standard analytics platforms.

> Humans are messy; these bots were clinically precise.

AI slop writing is so tiresome. At least it is somewhat noticeable.

I have noticed bots posting a various forums, not sure what the angle is as they aren’t usually trying to sell anything, just posting AI slop. I am going too assume it’s to build up some sort of legitimate looking profile for future use, it’s a scourge ruining other wise valuable sources of information.

Here is recent example:

https://diysolarforum.com/threads/ai-bots-are-here-on-diy-so...

Did I understand you to say that you created a script that watches how random visitors move their mice and scroll?

WTF? I’m pretty sure that’s either impossible or you have access to pretty scary malware.

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