Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#2Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real.
The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre patterns I saw and the off-the-record conversations I had with ad tech insiders. It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants to talk about because the whole system is propped up by it.
I'm curious if other developers, founders, or marketers here have seen similar discrepancies in their own data.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#3Not really surprised. I spend a ridiculous amount on time banning bots every week.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#4Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real. The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre pat…
“All clicks are click fraud” isn’t that far from the truth.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#5Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0] from its stats and analytics?
I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic.
[0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#6For any real audit of website traffic (M&A, large advertising deals, etc), you typically don't rely on self reported statistics, but rather 3rd parties (e.g. SimilarWeb). These have actual spywares on top of Google analytics plug-ins to correlate real traffic from noise
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#7I find the article's topic interesting, but the writing style is just... no. It reads like a True Crime transcript or really bad marketing copy. Which makes a certain kind of sense, I guess.
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#8What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly, bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that in 2025".
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#9Can you share the script you made for this analysis?
Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
#10Why is this in the least surprising? It's just the natural successor to what everyone used to do with the trade magazines thirty years ago. Back then you filled in a profile questionnaire to get a free subscription, so every basement hacker turned into the manager of a 500-person division with control of a $1m capital budget. The magazine didn't want to check because it would damage the demographic numbers that they pitched to advertisers. The advertisers knew that there was some liar's poker being played but everyone just rolled with it.