More than half of all web traffic in 2024 wasn't human. The Imperva bad bot report found that automated traffic overtook people for the first time in a decade, and a meaningful share of that automation spends its time clicking, loading, and "viewing" ads that were never meant for an actual person. That's invalid traffic, and if you've ever run a paid campaign anywhere near the open web, it's already touched your budget whether you noticed or not.

Invalid traffic isn't only bots, and it isn't always malicious. Some of it is a script scraping a page for research. Some of it is a real person double-clicking by accident. Some of it is a fraud operation built specifically to look like neither.…