The Lunio report argues that invalid traffic (IVT) and click fraud have evolved from an advertising-efficiency problem into a broader business and data-quality problem. Bots, click farms, accidental clicks, automated agents, and other non-genuine traffic don’t merely consume media budgets—they can contaminate CRM data, waste sales resources, and, increasingly, teach AI-driven advertising systems to optimize toward the wrong audiences. The findings are based on a May 2026 survey of 131 senior marketing leaders, 74% from brands and 26% from agencies.
The most important findings
Click fraud represents substantial budget leakage. More than three-quarters—75.6%—estimate they lose more than 5% of their monthly performance/digital budget to invalid traffic, while 48.1% estimate losses of 5–10%. The report illustrates the financial impact: an organization spending $5 million annually could potentially lose $250,000–$500,000, with losses potentially reaching $1.5 million in more severe cases.
At the same time, performance spending is increasing. 70.8% of marketers plan to increase performance-marketing budgets in 2026, meaning the dollars potentially exposed to IVT are growing.
The problem also creates an opportunity cost. If marketers could recover wasted ad spending, 45.8% say they would put more money into paid social and 29.8% into other paid media such as search. In other words, fraud doesn’t merely waste money—it can prevent marketers from scaling channels they believe could produce growth.
Google, Meta and TikTok are major areas of concern
Marketers perceive Google Search as having the greatest click-fraud risk exposure (35.9%), followed by TikTok and Meta at 22.9% each. The report notes that Google’s ranking partly reflects the large amount of money brands invest in search.
There is particular concern about increasingly automated campaign products. 29.8% suspect products such as Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ are increasing their exposure to invalid traffic.
AI could make the problem considerably more serious
This is arguably the report’s most consequential finding. Marketers’ biggest AI-related fear isn’t simply that bots will click ads. It’s that advertising algorithms will mistake bots for valuable prospects and subsequently optimize campaigns around them.
Some 51.1% identify optimization toward bots/non-human converters as a major threat, while 42% identify distorted retargeting lists. The concern is a feedback loop: bots generate seemingly legitimate conversion signals → algorithms interpret those signals as success → automated systems seek more traffic resembling those bots → campaign targeting becomes progressively corrupted.
That becomes particularly problematic as agentic AI begins browsing websites, clicking links and completing forms. Marketers aren’t confident they’re prepared. 41.2% are only “somewhat” confident their technology can distinguish a high-intent human from an autonomous AI agent, and another 19% are “not very confident.”
The damage extends well beyond advertising
Respondents identified three major operational consequences:
- Wasted advertising budgets — 24.4%
- Sales-team time wasted on bot-generated leads — 22.9%
- Corrupted CRM data — 22.1%
That distinction matters. Click fraud can contaminate the entire marketing-to-sales funnel, not just lower an advertising campaign’s ROAS.
Marketers are concerned—but largely unprotected
This is the central contradiction the report identifies.
More than half of respondents rate their concern about click fraud at 8–10 on a 10-point scale, including 24.4% who rate their concern a 10.
Yet only 5.3% currently use a dedicated IVT-prevention platform, while 53.5% have little or no knowledge of these platforms.
There’s also considerable skepticism toward the advertising platforms themselves: 38.9% express low trust in the invalid-click credits provided by major platforms. The report highlights the inherent tension in allowing companies earning revenue from advertising to determine which advertising traffic should be classified as invalid.
Budget is another obstacle: 30.5% identify insufficient budget as a primary barrier to implementing dedicated IVT prevention. The strongest arguments for CFO approval appear to be demonstrating better lead-to-MQL performance and recovered advertising dollars.
The bigger marketing implication
The report’s most important message isn’t really “bots are wasting ad dollars.”
It’s “bots may be corrupting the data that automated marketing systems use to decide where the next advertising dollar should go.”
That’s a substantially larger problem.
As digital marketing becomes increasingly dependent on automated bidding, machine-learning optimization, and agentic AI, conversion-signal quality becomes as important as media efficiency. If algorithms cannot reliably distinguish real customers from automated activity, marketers risk creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which bad traffic generates bad data, bad data trains algorithms, and those algorithms acquire even more bad traffic.
The report therefore concludes that marketers need to move toward independent traffic verification, stronger monitoring, and proactive IVT prevention, rather than relying exclusively on the advertising platforms’ own fraud measurements.
From a pharma/DTC marketing perspective, this finding could be especially interesting: if pharma marketers are optimizing DTC campaigns against contaminated engagement or conversion signals, the problem isn’t simply wasted media—it could undermine audience targeting, patient-acquisition metrics, CRM quality, and ultimately campaign ROI assessments. That pharma implication is my inference from the report; the survey itself is not pharma-specific.
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