AI ad fraud: How bots and clicks are faking popularity
AI-powered ad fraud is quietly draining billions from the online world. Click farms and bots are faking web traffic to trick brands, especially in places like China and Egypt.
In 2023 alone, these scams cost advertisers $84 billion—about 1 in every 5 dollars spent on online ads.
Experts warn things could get twice as bad by 2028.
Click farms and bots
Click farms use both people and bots to create fake clicks, making products seem way more popular than they really are.
Dhiraj Gupta from mFilterIt notes that platforms allowing massive bot hits just make things worse.
Bots now make up over half of all internet traffic, with new AI tools like GPTBot causing a huge spike in fake activity in late 2024.
Plus, generative AI is behind super-realistic deepfake ads that are even harder to spot—making it tough for brands (and all of us) to know what's real online anymore.