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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

• simul007 1y ago
  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.
  • PaulHoule 1y ago
    “All clicks are click fraud” isn’t that far from the truth.
    • SoftTalker 1y ago
      I've never intentionally clicked on an ad, ever. I've accidentally clicked a few, due to tricks or fat fingers.
      • jpadkins 1y ago
        Did you read the article? If so, you clicked on an ad. This blog post was an ad for datacops.
        • hombre_fatal 1y ago
          And if you've ever scrolled social media or used the internet at all, you've read and clicked ads. Only considering old school "Ads by google" banners as ads and then patting yourself on the back for never clicking them is pretty faint praise for your ad evasion skills.
        • SoftTalker 1y ago
          No, of course I've read longer form posts and then realized they were just there for product placement, or affilate links, etc. I don't click display ads or links to Amazon or YouTube listings, etc. If I want to buy something I try to go directly to the manufacture's site and search for it there. If I have to go to a third party sales platform I'll go there and search for the thing I want. I rarely click on YouTube recommedations, because they are more and more just AI slop. I subscribe to people whose content is interesting, and that's the vast majority of what I watch.
      • speedgoose 1y ago
        You never watched a YouTube video that was some kind of teleshopping show ?
      • PaulHoule 1y ago
        Ah... I remember back when Anandtech would run a monthly roundup of hard drives that would usually insist that you pay another $150-$200 for a hard drive because hypothetically the more esoteric consumer SKUs were 3db softer or consumed 0.2W less than the mass-produced least-cost enterprise Seagates. [1] They unquestioningly quoted the spec sheets and never did any tests whereas everyone knows you can't trust spec sheets when it comes to noise and power. The thing was that site kept reflowing the layout over and over again and I think the point was that they were hoping you were going to click on something you saw on the sidebar and then it would reflow and an ad would be there right at the second when you clicked and then... Ka-Ching! [1] Funny reversal that the enterprise product is mass market and the consumer product is overpriced if not gold-plated.
    • Nasrudith 1y ago
      Yeah. Even in the extremely rare circumstance where if I actually want to see more about the product I specifically search it instead of clicking on it because everyone knows clicking on the ad is how you get infected, spied, on or scammed. And I think they already discarded 'views' long ago as too useless ironically.
  • yellow_lead 1y ago
    This is so common, I find it strange to see a whole article framing it as a shocking phenomenon. Like, have you heard of PostHog?
    • urbandw311er 1y ago
      What do you mean re Posthog?
  • rightbyte 1y ago
    What do you think is the false negative ratio of the remaining 27%? A 0.1% total conversion rate would imply 1/270 visitors buying stuff and I am quite certain I buy stuff in maybe every 10th online store I visit or something.
  • criddell 1y ago
    Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales over some period. What was the ad spend for that period? Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to figure out if it was a successful campaign or not. When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that matters is impact on the bottom line.
    • nemomarx 1y ago
      If you could pay for web ads in the same way you could pay for a billboard (flat rate per period of time) yeah that would help. if you pay per impression or view or click you have some other issues
      • giancarlostoro 1y ago
        I love when I see websites that do this. They are just rare enough, but I appreciate them for existing.
    • processing 1y ago
      yes, the co is likely spending big money on retargeting to bring back a potential customer to sell what the bot clicked on to generate retargeting. it's fraud and costing the company money.
    • boplicity 1y ago
      It makes optimizing your ads significantly harder. Imagine trying to understand traffic flow on a freeway when 99.9% of cars are just projected illusions. Not fun. Effective advertising depends on iterative testing, which is very hard if the signal to noise ratio is way off.
    • paulcole 1y ago
      > Does it really matter if it's all fraud Uh, yes. If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent clicks.
  • seviu 1y ago
    I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry. We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%. In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. Bots are real people after all
    • PedroBatista 1y ago
      He idea of "reality" and how things work, even if the idea is "they work bad", is more important than any other argument or reality. That's true at personal level and even truer at any organizational level.
      • wholinator2 1y ago
        Well yes but seems business has decided truth is worth less than money. Or now that i think of it, everything is worth less than money. Even, money is the only thing worth anything. They don't care about people, pride, products, or truth.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • nostrademons 1y ago
          I think the way it goes is more "What is true? It's that if I bury this truth, I will have more money." Interestingly, I think money is increasingly its own falsehood now. A lot of rich people are finding that they pay a lot to get what's basically a scam, like Sam Altman's swimming pool that leaked and ruined the rest of the house [1]. There's a reason that Billionaire's Bunker [2] is entering the cultural zeitgeist despite fairly terrible plotting, dialogue, and acting. [1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/17/sam-altman-infinity-pool-mansion-flooding-lawsuit/ https://fortune.com/2024/07/17/sam-altman-infinity-pool-mans... [2] https://www.netflix.com/title/81606699 https://www.netflix.com/title/81606699
    • at-fates-hands 1y ago
      >> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. Did something similar at a small company I was working at. The VP of marketing sat me down and told me to do the same thing. After the meeting, I was told by another dev that the VP was tying a monetary value to specific clicks and if I was filtering out the bots, it would make his data look bad and reduce the amount of potential revenue for the company he was touting. I think you can see how the bots were actually helping him promote how awesome a job he was doing with our web properties to the owners.
  • jklinger410 1y ago
    > I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. Why not use Microsoft Clarity? > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care.
    • unbalancedevh 1y ago
      > You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care. Not just not care, but don't they have incentive to report higher traffic?
      • pixl97 1y ago
        At this point Google is just committing fraud to justify high stock prices.
    • hdseggbj 1y ago
      That's like saying why not just live on the dole? Answer: pride, curiosity, inspiration, creativity, a sense of ownership, integrity, control, vision I can't believe these concepts are so foreign to so many.
      • jklinger410 1y ago
        Okay, well I'm asking the author why they developed their own analytics tool rather than using an industry standard hoping there's some reason beyond motivational phrases. Like, asking if there's a real technical reason. But, go off I guess.
  • Theodores 1y ago
    Yes, and a lot of the pain is self-inflicted. Too often I have been working on ecommerce gigs where the traffic comes from internal 'SEO' tools. Normally the person in charge is marketing, not technical, so it has always been difficult to get past identifying the problem to fixing it. Often ecommerce companies are very siloed, so one person in one part of the 'team' is scraping the site with their special tools, only for another person to be doing another scrape with their special tools. You can have the guy doing the newsletter doing his thing, the guy doing organic search doing their thing, the guy doing paid ads doing their thing and someone in sales doing their own thing. The sad thing is that they are typically just a few SQL joins away from exactly the data they want in a format they can digest. However, due to silo-ing, it can be hard to have that conversation. On top of that, you do get new bots that need to be dealt with. The Huawei bot will scrape everything yet the store might not be delivering to China. So there are legit bots not doing ad fraud that need to be dealt with. What I also find interesting is that nobody is interested in the server logs. They come for free, and, although not having CDN cache hits, they still record checkout transactions and any pages that don't have a freshly cached page. Ad fraud also goes on in companies. I worked for a very successful company once and we only measured sales and what was out of stock. We didn't need open rates for emails or click through rates, our main problem was selling too much, which was a nice problem to have. Note that if you sell too much then you aren't going to get it all out the door in a timely fashion, or you run out of big lorries to put the orders in. Since then I have not worked on a site that is as successful. Instead we have people getting praise for 'false metrics'. Anything an SEO person creates or a marketeer measures will always have some nonsense aspect to it. Or the accounting is mixed with brick and mortar sales even though free shipping and discounts have been given on each sale, with adwords used to get people through the 'door'. Since sales manager has to report to someone on the board, if the sales numbers aren't good, the nonsense stats can be used to obfuscate the facts. The board only ever care about profit, so I don't like the way this goes down with false metrics of nonsense. Another fundamental problem in ecommerce is a lack of basic salesmanship. If you work the shop floor doing specialist sales where you have to listen to the customer's needs, then you gain experience in the art of sales. You haven't got to be good at it, in fact it can be better to know your limitations, for me that is big ticket items where I don't have the product knowledge, however, I could always hand those sales over to a much more capable colleague. You don't win every sale, but, in retail, you can have some really good streaks where no customer leaves empty handed. Your conversion rate is going to be more like 90% in face to face sales if you have the right product at the right price, with customers that don't buy coming back the following day or week to splash the cash. In High Street retail there is no way you give customers 15%+ off just for stepping through the door. Yet this is table stakes in ecommerce, particularly for small to medium size shops. This instantly devalues the product. Often there will be chatbots for whatever reason, and I am sure the likes of Dell can get that right, but your typical small ecommerce site will fluff this up too, so any customer daring to use the chatbot will not get instant help from a sales person. So what to do? It depends on your product, however, the goal is to get customers for life, not to churn through them. To achieve this it comes down to product, price, availability, shipping times, customer service and incentives for the customer to advertise for you, with reviews, word of mouth and all that hard stuff that needs real human skill. Sometimes it will only be a one-off sale, for example, if someone is buying a mattress. But, even then, the customer service basics matter. What is also silly is how, with everything you buy, you will get adverts and incentives to buy what you have just purchased. I don't know why this is not considered career limiting, but nobody seems to have fixed this. Next time, I will find out what data everyone needs and have my own script to collect just that data, then have a live backup that can be used for all internal purposes such as report generation. There will be no mystery script containers downloading 150 scripts with cookies, outside of developer supervision. My hunch is that the only numbers that really matter are sales. As for why the sales aren't happening, so long as functionality is as it should be on all devices, then you have to dig deeper, to the knowledge level that only someone that has worked the showroom floor understands. Really, a website should be the sales person's knowledge condensed into HTML. Yet nobody asks the guy serving customers what they upsell or what product they recommend if a customer baulks at a given product. Instead we have mystery-meat AI scripts that manage these things. Thanks for the heads up on ad fraud, normally I am a long way from that due to internal scraping efforts being far more damaging to website performance, and, as a developer, page load times matter to me far more than how much was paid for the traffic.
  • cantrevealname 1y ago
    > "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown." The word "revenue" above doesn't sound right. Did you mean "ad impressions", "clicks", "visits", or something else? If the bot traffic is giving you 40% more revenue, well that's excellent news, right? If it's revenue, then keep doing it.
    • Sander_Marechal 1y ago
      It's revenue for the ad platforms, not for the clients
  • KaiserPro 1y ago
    But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale? I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?
    • randunel 1y ago
      Scrape data and package+sell it, either on demand or pre scraped.
    • burnte 1y ago
      > But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? I agree, I have a hard time understanding the motivation for this behavior. It's obviously happening, I just don't know how someone benefits from a bot pretending to browse the internet.
      • bombcar 1y ago
        Isn't the idea that you run google ads on your site, and then have your botnet click the ads on your site, and you get paid for the traffic?
        • KaiserPro 1y ago
          Aha! that makes much more sense. Yeah having something autobot your click throughs seems like a motivation to run bots. I was thinking about ad traffic from one of the meta/twitter/tiktok products and couldn't think what the motivation would be
        • burnte 1y ago
          It would but the fact it goes out and does it to other sites is weird. Why would someone else fraudulently click my ads? As an attack, I understand that, I've had that done to me. Just randomly seems odd. Maybe I'm just not creative enough to think of bad things to do with this. :D
  • larrymcp 1y ago
    > I had one client spending $12,000 per month on Google Ads In Google Ads you can just turn off the option to run your ads on non-Google sites; I think it's called their Display Network. Just run your campaign only on Google's search pages. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this rather common solution.
  • dang 1y ago
    > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement I've nicked that sentence to use as the title above, since it's more neutral and representative of what the article is about.
  • dpoloncsak 1y ago
    I work in e-commerce and completely believe this could be true. The 'Cart Abandonment Bot' is actually something we just had a meeting on today, trying to figure out what's going on here. With that said, what do you think the error is here? Could your script have had some false positives? Enough to move the dial?
    • bombcar 1y ago
      Some sites won't give you the price or the shipping until you add to cart, but that shouldn't map to an automatic removal of item from cart (unless there IS a timer somewhere set to 4 minutes on the server side). Strange that the item cost $47 and the number of sales was 47.
    • dwd 1y ago
      I would also be looking for card washing and see if they attempted to purchase and the card failed. Repeated purchase attempts, particularly on the cheapest product in the catalogue is a bad sign.
  • Terr_ 1y ago
    > It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants to talk about because the whole system is propped up by it. I was never really a punk-rebel kid, but a certain part of me rooted in the optimism of the early-internet kinda wants to see ad-models crash and burn. Even advertising "working normally" always had a psychic odor of exploitation and deceit. Ex: "You absolutely need this product or else your peers will hate you."
    • Terr_ 1y ago
      P.S.: Imagine a world with "AI" (open-source, user-controlled) which can instantly detect ads on your screen, and pass the bounding-boxes to another program which covers them up. You could even install them on some digital glasses for a kind of They Live sunglasses situation [0], but please never wear such things while driving... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqrrh86WDG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqrrh86WDG0
  • cortesoft 1y ago
    I find it really interesting when you describe “good bot” traffic. > During my investigation, a source from the e-commerce data industry provided a crucial piece of the puzzle. He explained that his former company was responsible for 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. I think a lot of the players involved in this would say those are bad bots. Having your competitors scrape your site for data would probably be something most website owners wouldn’t like, but getting data about THEIR competitors would be something they WOULD like. All bot traffic is good from SOMEONE’S perspective, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. Someone had to program the bot, someone has to be running it. They obviously think they are good bots. The people running AI scraping bots think they are good bots. Many content creators think those are bad bots. Price comparison sites scraping retailers think their bots are good. The sites being scraped often think they are bad bots. I just don’t think we can clearly separate good and bad bot traffic without specifying whose perspective we are talking about.
    • harshreality 1y ago
      "Good bots" would be ones that fuel a healthy, competitive economy. Whether or not they're good from the perspective of a retailer, data about products and supply chains is important. "Bad bots" would be ones that primarily support grift. They siphon money from advertisers, or get other people to waste advertising $, or game product listing metrics so that the bots' owners products get better placement, or so that other manufacturers' products get worse placement. They're not creating any new value; they're removing value from the economy by causing bad allocation of resources.
      • cortesoft 1y ago
        I can see many bots falling into the two categories you describe, but I can also see many other bots that would not fit easily, and whose value is debatable. For example, bots that scrape content for AI training; is that good or bad for a healthy economy? AI can be productive, but is it ‘stealing’ other’s productivity, which could hurt in the long term if it causes decrease in future human production because of diminished rewards?
  • aorloff 1y ago
    We are now at the point where plausibly some bots could be at the behest of an AI agent controlled by a human. This is not likely to distort the basic numbers in your story, but it makes the premise questionable If your script can correctly segregate bot traffic from human traffic, and website operators can conclude that bot traffic does not make purchases, then what -- you still don't want to blackhole that traffic right ?
  • username223 1y ago
    > developers, founders, or marketers I'm none of those things, 10x or otherwise, and would be ashamed if I were. I do run a personal website, though, and most of the traffic is bots that ignore robots.txt. I wish those developers, founders, and marketers would stop doing that to me.
  • oconaros 1y ago
    I do web analytics consulting. One of my first projects at a digital marketing agency in 2021 was investigating weird traffic patterns for a global logistics firm. The findings are summarized in this blog post[1]. Bot traffic has been an issue for years. It has given rise to a new cottage industry of ad fraud detection services, none of which I’ve found particularly valuable. It always comes down to “so what do we do about it?” and no one seems to know how to get bots to stop viewing or clicking on paid media placements. Consumers use Google search and are on FB, IG, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc., and there aren’t really competing ad networks with “fewer bots”. So they keep buying fake traffic knowing that a significant chunk of it is invalid. I don’t see anything changing unless big tech companies making billions in ad revenue have a large enough incentive to do so. At the moment they have plenty of incentives to keep things as they are. “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” - John Wanamaker [1] https://jimalytics.com/industry/youre-buying-bots-an-inconvenient-truth/ https://jimalytics.com/industry/youre-buying-bots-an-inconve...
    • joomla199 1y ago
      Given that Wanamaker died in 1922 it’s safe to say his quote was in the context of a different problem entirely (which still exists, on top of the bot issue). Maybe it’s time to update to “three fourths”?
    • jimkleiber 1y ago
      I'd suggest legislation. It's like when hotels or rental car companies tack on additional fees and consumers hate it but don't have much incentive to cooperate to change it. Consumers don't unionize much, but maybe we should? But maybe not legislation, because it might upset a ton of people. Any time a social media site goes through and seems to get rid of bots, people complain about how many "followers" they've lost. The fake user/clicker situation is quite pervasive, and a lot of parties, not just the advertising networks, benefit from the inflated numbers. But it can be so insidious..."wow, that video got 1M YouTube views? Must be very popular!" Orrrr a lot of those views were from bots? Who knows? So maybe a better approach than legislation is to talk about how the ad/bot fraud can both help us and hurt us and not demonize one side but see how we all may be implicated in it somehow. Maybe that will help us to be more aware of the problem and not fight against people, but try to work together to solve it.
  • reconnecting 1y ago
    We've created open-source security analytics [1] that some organizations use for click fraud detection. The numbers that Google Ads shows as invalid clicks is dramatically different from what our platform detects. In our cases, most fraudulent clicks come from mobile devices and mobile networks. Also, bots don't load page resources in full, making them easier to detect. If your organization is struggling with fraud click detection, don't hesitate to reach out by email. We are ready to help. 1. https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno
• bodantogat 1y ago
  Not really surprised. I spend a ridiculous amount on time banning bots every week.
  • cantor_S_drug 1y ago
    doesn't cloudflare have block bot traffic out of the box?
    • mwexler 1y ago
      It blocks the most egregious and give a bot score that you can use to get more aggressive at the next layer. That score seems to miss a lot of bad traffic, making it not very useful in it's current state.
    • corford 1y ago
      They do but it's largely useless against all but the most unsophisticated of bots.
    • bodantogat 1y ago
      Some of the bots I see use residential proxies, rotate IP address, countries, as well as fire-up a real browser.
• curiousObject 1y ago
  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
  • nemomarx 1y ago
    In theory if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal?
    • curiousObject 1y ago
      if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal? Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because fake sign ups are possible). But you’re right. Purchase conversions are one incentive
      • kijin 1y ago
        Next thing you know, the bots will learn how to purchase products, and we'll have come full circle. I'd love to have an agent that goes online whenever I'm running low on toilet paper or something, browses all the stores and clicks all the ads, and automatically orders the best deal it can find.
        • technothrasher 1y ago
          I certainly wouldn't want to be caught in that arms race where sites continually attempt to find sneaky ways to convince my agent to buy things I don't actually want.
        • sanex 1y ago
          By clicking on all the ads you're raising prices in the long run and just funneling money to google and meta, forcing the toilet paper companies to make scratchier tp to try and squeeze out more margin. My bhole would thank you for not doing this.
• Galanwe 1y ago
  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
• Propelloni 1y ago
  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.
  • oasisbob 1y ago
    It's AI-generated. Grates on me too. The irony of complaining about bot traffic with bot copy is too funny. > It was not a sophisticated piece of software, just a tool designed to observe how "users" actually interacted with the website. I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior
• sixthDot 1y ago
  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".
  • viraptor 1y ago
    Yeah, their list of recommendations could use another point: expose the public data in a simple, structured way. I'm working right now on an inventory management system for a clinic which would really benefit from pulling the prices and availability from a very specialised online shop. I wish I could just get a large, fully cached status of all items in a json/CSV/whatever format. But they're extremely not interested, so I'm scraping the html from 50 separate categories instead. They'll get a few daily bot hits and neither of us will be happy about it. If people are scraping data that you're not selling, they're not going to stop - just make it trivially accessible instead in a way that doesn't waste resources and destroy metrics.
    • nemomarx 1y ago
      I wonder if LLM agents will know to go for apis and data or if they'll keep naively scraping in the future. A lot of traffic could come down to "find me x product online" chats eventually
      • viraptor 1y ago
        https://llmstxt.org/ https://llmstxt.org/ is there for that purpose.
    • bdcravens 1y ago
      HTML is the only truly universal standard.
    • Closi 1y ago
      The counterpoint is 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'? Sure you might be willing to build the bot to scrape it... but some other competitors won't go to this effort so it still means a bit of information asymmetry and stops some of your competitors poaching customers / employing various marketing tactics to exploit short term shortages or pricing charges etc.
• hamburgererror 1y ago
  Can you share the script you made for this analysis?
• Dead_Lemon 1y ago
  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.
  • marcosdumay 1y ago
    It's a huge argument for dumb advertisement that doesn't track people or clicks. You know, the kind that existed before Google created their thing.
• squeedles 1y ago
  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.
• Esophagus4 1y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 1y ago
    There are two kinds of bots - one that the very act of them futzing with your site is degrading performance (think AI bot DDoS), and the other that is annoying but not harming you directly. The second is best "blocked" by doing nothing at all and instead silently dropping them from analytics.
• baobun 1y ago
  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."
  • fukka42 1y ago
    > 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." Lawsuit time?
    • pixl97 1y ago
      I mean how much money are you going to spend going after them? Multi billion dollar companies love to take decades to sue. If the SEC weren't weak maybe they could go after them for fraudulent numbers.
      • omnicognate 1y ago
        IANAL (or an ad industry expert) but wouldn't a successful class action on this be staggeringly vast?
        • pixl97 1y ago
          I mean it would rock the US economy as it would involve the largest companies.
• chrismorgan 1y ago
  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.
  • nemomarx 1y ago
    50k to 47 conversions seems like a noticeable increase in fakeness to me at least. that's going from more than half fraud to essentially only fraud with a rounding error amount of real users
    • lazide 1y ago
      This is the ‘gold’ that agentic/generative AI really produces. For most consumers, it’s entertainment, but for industrial use it’s great for this kind of fraud. And very difficult to detect at scale, since the only cost effective tools for this kind of analysis are also ML/AI, and hence can be fooled more predictably/trained against.
      • philipwhiuk 1y ago
        > This is the ‘gold’ that agentic/generative AI really produces. And here's me thinking it was producing a tonne more data scraping.
        • lazide 1y ago
          That’s the coal for the steam engine
  • 01284a7e 1y ago
    [dead]
• nurettin 1y ago
  > 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.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Why doesn't Amazon provide this information? They just can't be bothered, knowing that they are the biggest retail platform and sellers "have" to be there regardless of how bad the experience is for them?
    • nurettin 1y ago
      They have atrocious FBA fees. Then there's etsy, overstock, wayfair, shopify, but nothing gives you the rush of showing that buybox I guess. It's like an optimization game for them at this point.
• awongh 1y ago
  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.
  • ryandrake 1y ago
    It would take a lot more investigative journalism to track down the bot networks and figure out the why and who, which I agree is the more interesting information. It’s not surprising that nobody seems to be willing to be quoted by name as a source. The whole industry seems fake and shady. Despite the “LinkedIn influencer” writing style of the article, the results don’t seem that shocking or unexpected.
  • brazukadev 1y ago
    > You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely) Unlikely?
    • shmeeed 1y ago
      Highly unlikely, because they obviously would never engage in fraudulent activity! I mean, what would even be their incenti- Eh, you know what, let's just not think too much about it.
      • brazukadev 1y ago
        If they know it is a bot, it is fraudulent. They know it is a bot when it is time to pay from their Adsense arm. It is insane that the same click that isn't paid to the publishers still goes to google's pockets.
• rubyfan 1y ago
  Who is profiting from the ad fraud?
  • rightbyte 1y ago
    Site owners and ad market places?
• jt2190 1y ago
  > 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.
  • MASNeo 1y ago
    So are you saying it needs a an agent.txt along the robots.txt?
    • jt2190 1y ago
      I’m just the idea guy… I’ll let the market decide on the exact implementation. ;-) (That’s not a bad idea BTW.)
  • dpoloncsak 1y ago
    I don't think anyone was arguing against those? The post seems mostly focused on bots that are being used to facilitate ad-fraud or manipulate rankings on marketplace sites with 3rd party vendors. I guess to check a price, you would need to scrape the site, but repeatedly adding and abandoning items, abusing referral systems.... That feels a lot more like 'fraud' than 'the world evolving'
• shiftingleft 1y ago
  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?
  • nemomarx 1y ago
    I assume it's the filtering - detect the user is a bot, don't even load the ads, etc?
    • shiftingleft 1y ago
      As I understand it they are placing ads on other sites and are paying for visits to their site.
    • weird-eye-issue 1y ago
      You didn't think through this did you How would you do that on Google or a third-party site?
  • V__ 1y ago
    I could imagine that blocking bot traffic, would improve their retargeting and make sure that the retargeting budget is spent on real people leading to an increase in conversion.
    • shiftingleft 1y ago
      What's the API here for Google Ads? How does their site report to Google Ads whether that was a good/bad user? Is this done through conversion tracking? If so, why would you track anything but a completed purchase in the first place?
• tagalog 1y ago
  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.
  • onionisafruit 1y ago
    What’s ugc?
    • anticorporate 1y ago
      ugc = user generated content
• MASNeo 1y ago
  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.
• emacdona 1y ago
  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.
• vmaurin 1y ago
  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
  • malfist 1y ago
    Google ads are often like paying someone to stand in front of your business and hand out flyers to everyone going inside. Sure, a lot of your visitors were handed a flyer by google before they showed up in your store, but were any of them new customers?
    • frodo8sam 1y ago
      It's worse, you're paying them so your competitor isn't standing in front of your store convincing them not to be your costumer. You can either buy the top spot on queries that are looking for you or google will sell it to your competitor.
      • falcor84 1y ago
        It's even worse, because it's Google who built a high platform in front of your store in the first place, with comfy chairs for your competitors to sit on.
    • hermitcrab 1y ago
      Very true. So you end up on paying for a lot of clicks from existing customers who type your product name into Google and click on the first thing that comes up, which is increasingly an ad. I used to advertise in Adwords on the name of my products, but I no longer bother.
• ramesh31 1y ago
  Cue the "always has been" meme
• mjd 1y ago
  “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!
• Waterluvian 1y ago
  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.
  • shmeeed 1y ago
    I remember that article as well. Initially I could have sworn this was a repost, but it's got a current date. There might be some Mandela effect at work.
    • bombcar 1y ago
      We may have all collectively hallucinated it, but I've felt the advertising market has been bullshit for quite a while.
• jason_zig 1y ago
  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/ https://www.zigpoll.com/
• protonbob 1y ago
  > 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.
  • Nasrudith 1y ago
    That just looks like 'writer over-educated in grammar above and beyond fluency, to the point they know how to use semicolons properly'. AI writer detection is just a new manifestation of superstition's origins as spurious pattern matching.
    • dandellion 1y ago
      Well, as a foreign English speaker I have to thank you for calling me over-educated in grammar above and beyond fluency in a language that is not my own. But aside from that I can tell you that those sentences are either written by AI, and in the minuscule possibility that they weren't, the author must have been intentionally writing to sound like AI for the sake of being post-ironic. The second I saw the first sentence I knew it was AI and came straight to the comments to look for the thread of someone complaining so I could pile on. PS: For what it's worth, I still think the article was moderately interesting, even if lazily and poorly written by delegating the task to an AI.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  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)
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  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?
  • hahn-kev 1y ago
    Maybe it's bots trying to look like real people? So not targeting you specifically, but just trying to fake being real users?
    • hermitcrab 1y ago
      This possibly counts for some of it, where you are just the collateral damage of somebody trying to disguise their bot as a real user. It feels unlikely to be the majority of bots though, but I could be wrong.
      • guhcampos 1y ago
        I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant. These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign. Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game. It happened way too many times in the past decade.
  • wussboy 1y ago
    My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court challenge against any competitor because they have almost unlimited resources.
• elgrantomate 1y ago
  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.
  • toast0 1y ago
    > 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. Advertisement has always been largely a waste of money, the problem is always trying to figure out what part is a waste and what part is effective. Internet advertising promised to be more specifically targeted and attributable than previous advertising models, but I don't think that really turned out well. As an advertiser, you really have to work hard to know how things are working. Ask customers to tell you how they found you, but know that customers don't always know and don't always share what they know. Adjust advertising campaigns (including turning them off) and see how things change, but changes take a while to filter though. And you've got to do all the other things too --- a lot of new or smaller companies make the mistake of spending a lot on advertisements to drive traffic to them when they can't service the traffic: coupon campaigns that get too many people in, or sending you to a page that's unclear or difficult to use so people bail out, etc. The article claims 50k visitors, 47 sales, $4000 in ad spend; it's not really clear if that's overall visitor numbers or just from the traffic attributed to advertising. Measuring success by visitor numbers or sales counts was never the right way to measure success; the numeric measure of success for a business should be an accounting measure of net income [1], which is only somewhat related to visitor and sales count. If this business generates $500 of net income for every sale (excluding advertising costs), then $4000 in ad spend to generate 47 sales seems reasonable; if they generate $1 of net income for every sale, then $4000 in ad spend is highly problematic. [1] GAAP or adjusted as appropriate to the business
• hackthemack 1y ago
  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/ 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-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  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-spending-851-on-reddit-ads/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
  • pixl97 1y ago
    I mean it could just be people scraping everything, and as reddit has made that more difficult the scrapers may look more realistic. That or dark patters that get people to click on ads in the middle of content, where the user instantly backs out once they realize.
    • hermitcrab 1y ago
      >dark patters that get people to click on ads in the middle of content, where the user instantly backs out once they realize. I'm sure that is at least part of it. And if they can be creative about how they get the page to draw, they can get you to click on something unintentionally. The shitty website of my local paper is good at this.
  • zeroonetwothree 1y ago
    Reddit seems to have one of the biggest bot problems of any social media.
    • terribleperson 1y ago
      Bot problems have gotten worse all across the internet, but I think reddit specifically has gotten worse because of their IPO. It seems that if you're a social media platform, the most profitable option is to ignore bots while swearing up and down that your users are legitimate and you do everything you can to fight bots.
• max-privatevoid 1y ago
  Perhaps this will eventually lead them to give up on spying on users altogether.
• damethos 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
• rudderdev 1y ago
  Bots everywhere
• bluGill 1y ago
  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.
  • RamtinJ95 1y ago
    Do you have any links to sources around these other ways to get the data? I recently started working in this domain and trying to get up to speed on state of the art regardings these types of things specifically since im in the data team.
    • bluGill 1y ago
      No. I once knew someone who did this for a big company back before the internet took off, but we lost touch. It is basic applied statistics, but likely there is a lot more than I don't know anything about. Likely you can ask someone who has done more study in that area to get details.
• pmarreck 1y ago
  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
• 1718627440 1y ago
  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.
• dbs 1y ago
  We had vibe coding. Now we have vibe engineering. Next stop, vibe faking.
• satisfice 1y ago
  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.
  • elmean 1y ago
    google posthog for me
  • georgel 1y ago
    There are tons of tools that collect stuff like this, hotjar.com has been a thing for over a decade.
  • satisfice 1y ago
    I'm glad to know some people are working on things that block that... https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mouse-tracking.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mouse-tracking.html
• kqr 1y ago
  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.
• ashanoko 1y ago
  [dead]
• SirMaster 1y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks that websites shouldn't even be able to see a users mouse movement or scrolling?
  • shmeeed 1y ago
    Me too, and even though I had heard about it before, I was thankful for the sobering reminder.
• dgfl 1y ago
  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?
  • doc_manhat 1y ago
    Yes I saw the AIisms and immediately went to the comments lol. It's interesting I still don't think that it's worth reading stuff that seems so obviously AI generated! If you can't be bothered to write or at least edit it I guess I just by default end up trusting the content less.
  • jrochkind1 1y ago
    Lost me at "It all started with a simple, devastating problem." Tried to keep going, but "a strange, unsettling feeling crept in," yes indeed. Also please note OP is marketting copy for an analytics product that presumably says it will filter out bot traffic better?
    • Forgeties79 1y ago
      “Her traitor tears betraying her”
  • Animats 1y ago
    The picture looks AI-generated, too, or at least irrelevant clip art.
  • jmuguy 1y ago
    Really ironic given the content of this post. Glad that humans are already getting pretty good at clocking this sort of BS quickly, makes it easy to ignore. Maybe a new idiom for our time. Startups want to fail quickly, I want to detect AI generated content quickly so I can move on.
• hsuduebc2 1y ago
  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.
• crystaln 1y ago
  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.
• jrochkind1 1y ago
  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."
• SigmundA 1y ago
  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-solar-forum-please-report-them.111500/ https://diysolarforum.com/threads/ai-bots-are-here-on-diy-so...
• Animats 1y ago
  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.
• buellerbueller 1y ago
  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.
• tiahura 1y ago
  This is news? The whole idea of allowing low-trust countries access to the internet makes little sense.
• jlarocco 1y ago
  I'm not a big fan of AI, but if it kills off online advertising and marketting, maybe there's a silver lining...
• dnw 1y ago
  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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08338
• LunaSea 1y ago
  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?
• mustaphah 1y ago
  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.
• simul007 1y ago
  Hi HN, I posted yesterday thinking nobody would care and was ready to just leave it alone. Waking up today to see all these comments absolutely shocked me. Here are answers to the main questions I'm seeing: Regarding the writing style: Look, I used AI to edit the article for clarity and professionalism only for the blog. This is a business website, not a personal blog. If you want the raw, unedited version, check this Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataCops/s/vieMBQO8Lg https://www.reddit.com/r/DataCops/s/vieMBQO8Lg I find it ironic that some people are more focused on criticizing the writing style than addressing the actual problem I'm documenting. About sharing the script: Sophisticated bot detection can't rely on Microsoft Clarity or traditional analytics alone. It requires multiple data points: Modern bots use specific behavioral patterns at scale with customized browser configurations (not just basic headless browsers). You need to understand frameworks like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium very well to detect them. You need access to live global datacenter IP databases. Even when click farms use real phones with real browsers, IP intelligence helps distinguish human from automated behavior. Each device needs a unique IP, when it runs its target activity to avoid fraud detection. Detection involves analyzing dozens of factors simultaneously. The data in this article is real. I stand by the findings.
• scotty79 1y ago
  Ad industry is a parasite of the economy. Advertising should be banned and replaced with a single, tax funded database of products and services everyone could access.