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.

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

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

  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."

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

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.

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".

Can you share the script you made for this analysis?

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.

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.

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."

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Who is profiting from the ad fraud?

> 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.

  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.

I don't understand how detecting bot traffic would directly lead to less ad spend.

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?

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.

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.

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

After a decade in adtech, I can confidently say that 73% of all traffic is fake.