Half the internet isn’t people. It’s automation wearing a hoodie. And a big chunk of it isn’t friendly.
So what do these bot armies actually do? They steal ad dollars with fake clicks. They scrape your prices and content. They guess passwords until one works. They hoard sneakers and tickets, then resell them to you at a markup. They flood sites to knock them offline. They spam, boost, and whisper in comment sections until noise sounds like truth.
My AI research agent pulled the boring reports, not the headlines. Imperva’s latest shows roughly half of traffic is automated, and about a third is flat-out malicious on their network. Cloudflare shows heavy automation too but measures it differently. That viral Akamai number you’ve seen tossed around is shaky. Translation: the bot wave is real, but exact percentages depend on where you stand.
Let’s zoom into the money drain that hurts most today: made-for-advertising junk sites. They look like blogs, but they’re slot machines designed for impressions, not humans. The ANA’s programmatic audit found roughly a fifth of display ads landed on this garbage, burning about ten billion a year. Picture paying for a stadium show and playing to mannequins. Your reach numbers glow, your CFO bleeds.
How do these operations run? Headless browsers in cloud servers. Rotating residential proxies that make bots look like normal folks at home. Device fingerprints that lie. CAPTCHAs solved by cheap human click farms for cents a pop. Toolkits and accounts sold on Telegram like takeout.
Here’s the catch. The drama sells, but the fixes are boring. Lock down the front door - your login and data endpoints - because stuffed passwords and API scraping are where revenue leaks. Tune bot defenses to checkout, pricing, search. Cut your ad supply chain until you can name every hop. And accept that your analytics are partly fiction.
My take: bots aren’t a horror movie. They’re a tax on doing business online. Pay it smart, or pay it blind. 🤖
Where are bots bleeding you right now - ads, logins, or inventory?