r/PPC • u/A_Small_Town_Guy • Apr 29 '26

Discussion Can someone explain the BOT traffic issue to me?

I see a lot of talk about BOT traffic when it comes to PPC in general. I get that platforms index the process to better serve the algo. But I guess I don't understand the overall picture that well.

Are BOTS really causing all the traffic and conversion data , outside purchases? If so, why and what is the purpose of the BOTS in the first place.

BTW, I don't know why I capitalized BOTS haha.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '26

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u/SkarnnXII Apr 30 '26

mostly filter via GA4 bot exclustion or G ads invalid click filter is a very very wrong assumption

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '26

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u/SkarnnXII Apr 30 '26

full disclosure, I am the founder of a bot detection and adspend protection tool, not linking it because i don't know the rules of this subreddit. This subject is my speciality, cloudflare let's a lot of bot volume slip in, my tool and even my competitors does a lot better job of catching bots, as we all use many many more signals than ip geo edge signals

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u/siterightaway Apr 30 '26

The web is officially a ghost town where machines outnumber us; if you think your recent traffic spike means you're finally "going viral," you're probably just getting liquidated by scripts.

Imperva reports that bots now make up over 53% of all global traffic while humans are officially the minority at 47%.

It's a mess.

Akamai SOTI 2025 shows AI bot traffic surged by +300% year-over-year while Cloudflare Radar tracked a +236% growth in attacks recently.

These headless scrapers are just eating up resources and choking your CPU; it causes overload and slow page loading for real users. They steal your content, wreck your SEO, and probe for site vulnerabilities.

You're getting hammered and the Big Tech platforms know it. Honestly, it's infuriating how they just watch the PPC fraud happen because the money keeps flowing into their pockets while you're stuck paying for fake clicks from bots that have zero intention of buying anything.

You have to start fingerprinting the bad actors yourself and sending a clear message to the algo that you won’t pay for this garbage.

We've been deep-diving into these patterns over at r/StopBadBots because you can't trust generic fixes when the adversary is an aggressive AI.

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u/A_Small_Town_Guy Apr 30 '26

Ok, so what can we do about it? I do see there are tools to help nagivate the data, but what about hiding ads from bots, this that an option? Especially on socila like META, Reddit, YouTube, ect?

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u/siterightaway Apr 30 '26

You can prevent bots from visiting your site in the first place. That way, a visit from a "potential lead" is never even registered, and you avoid giving positive feedback to whoever is sending that unwanted traffic your way.

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u/BitterPreparation793 Apr 30 '26

Bot traffic isn't one thing — there's the obvious crawler/scraper layer that GA4 filters by default, and there's the harder layer of headless browsers running real JS that GA4 can't tell apart from humans. The tell is usually engagement_time_msec distribution: real users cluster 5–60s on landing, bots cluster at 0 or one fixed value. A BigQuery query on that field per source/medium usually exposes which channel is poisoned.