Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement • Hacker News Board

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#221

Post by awongh » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

shmeeed wrote: post #117

brazukadev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic is faked by them (unlikely) Unlikely?

Highly unlikely, because they obviously would never engage in fraudulent activity! I mean, what would even be their incenti- Eh, you know what, let's just not think too much about it.

As I said above, I think it's likely they don't do that much about fake adsense clicks.

Fraudulently creating traffic and charging you for it is a whole other level of scam, though.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#222

Post by doc_manhat » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

bestatsiege_01 wrote: post #129

jklinger410 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party analytics tools you can use to track the website. > if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic. These megacorps don't have VPNs? >…

With respect to: >> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic >Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes no sense. I have only ever been a buyer; so my technical understanding of the back end implementation is incomplete. However, I think the point OP is trying to make is that the back end of the ad targeting infrastructure ends up attributing "spend" to fo…

No I'm with him it still makes no sense to me. There's a massive assumption that because you fit the profile you'd have heard of the service if there wasn't advertising. A major part of advertising is to find people who like your product. You advertise to let people know about your product and keep it in their minds. Lift over baseline is relevant yes for ROI, but it doesn't imply the service is worthless!

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#223

Post by ww520 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

seviu wrote: post #68

simul007 wrote: post #2

Hi 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…

I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry. We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%. In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. Bots are real people after all

Way back when I work in an ad based company, click fraud handling was under my overseeing. We caught about 20 percent of clicks as fraudulent and filtered them out before billing the ad placing vendors. It was a constant battle with the sales team to relax the rules, as any clicks filtered out cut into the sales revenue. Sometimes we got the customers on our side as they ran their own analysis on the billed click report and came back demanding refund as they found a bunch of fraudulent clicks.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#224

Post by LeifCarrotson » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #195

Kye wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me think of the recent thing where YouTube stopped counting views with ad blockers. The Linus Tech Tips people worked out they were still seeing the same ad impressions and revenue despite views dropping by half. Unfortunately, sponsorship deals are often sold on viewership and I'm not sure even LTT has the clout to convince them nothing is functionally different.

YouTube didn’t stop counting views with ad blockers. It was one blocker extension that added the view counter api to the block list.

That's splitting hairs, but in a way that's important to the conversation.

If YouTube served gigabytes of the video file for 40 munutes and human watched it for that time, but they didn't send a request to `youtube.com/api/stats/atr/` and periodically to `/stats/qoe?`, did the video actually get viewed?

I think a reasonable person would say that the person viewed that video. Only a programmer would suggest that wasn't a view because they didn't properly engage the statistics and tracking endpoints.

But so much of the industry is built on deeply invasive tracking and third-party ad networks that this is a normal thing.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#225

Post by doc_manhat » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:07 PM UTC

dgfl wrote: post #216

It’s interesting that this matches _exactly_ the ChatGPT writing style. There’s clearly some human data and work behind, but the entire article has the usual “it’s not just X, it’s …”, bold emphasis on specific words, bullet points, and probably more that I’m just subconsciously picking up. Nothing wrong with using ChatGPT for help of course, I just found it interesting and kind of ironic given the contents of the ar…

Yes I saw the AIisms and immediately went to the comments lol. It's interesting I still don't think that it's worth reading stuff that seems so obviously AI generated! If you can't be bothered to write or at least edit it I guess I just by default end up trusting the content less.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#226

Post by hsuduebc2 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

Does author suggesting that META or Google are building these bots to fake traffic? They are the one's making money from it.

I wouldn't understand what would be motivation of anyone else to create these bots to click on ad's on facebook. It must be the advertising's company.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#227

Post by crystaln » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

It's definitely better to know what traffic is real for many reasons, however won't clicks just lower the value of a click and conversion numbers, but leave overall conversion the same?

If conversion rate drops 90%, the value of a click should also drop 90% as companies adjust the bids for ads.

I'm sure this isn't always true in practice and it takes time for bids to adjust. I'm just wondering how much impact this actually has.

And on the other side, if ad companies were better at filtering bots, their clicks become more valuable and companies should be willing to pay more.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#228

Post by jrochkind1 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:25 PM UTC

dgfl wrote: post #216

It’s interesting that this matches _exactly_ the ChatGPT writing style. There’s clearly some human data and work behind, but the entire article has the usual “it’s not just X, it’s …”, bold emphasis on specific words, bullet points, and probably more that I’m just subconsciously picking up. Nothing wrong with using ChatGPT for help of course, I just found it interesting and kind of ironic given the contents of the ar…

Lost me at "It all started with a simple, devastating problem."

Tried to keep going, but "a strange, unsettling feeling crept in," yes indeed.

Also please note OP is marketting copy for an analytics product that presumably says it will filter out bot traffic better?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#229

Post by jrochkind1 » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:30 PM UTC

Please note the site this appears on, `joindatacops.com` is selling an analytics product? So this is presumably marketing copy about how their product can do better at filtering bots?

"First-party Web Analytics That Powers CRM: Stop losing leads to blockers, bots, and fake clicks. DataCops gives your CRM the real customer journey."

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#230

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #215

cortesoft wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really interesting when you describe “good bot” traffic. > During my investigation, a source from the e-commerce data industry provided a crucial piece of the puzzle. He explained that his former company was responsible for scraping 70 million retailer web pages every single day. This is a legitimate and massive source of automated traffic. > Why do they do this? For vital business intelligence. Major retai…

"Good bots" would be ones that fuel a healthy, competitive economy. Whether or not they're good from the perspective of a retailer, data about products and supply chains is important. "Bad bots" would be ones that primarily support grift. They siphon money from advertisers, or get other people to waste advertising $, or game product listing metrics so that the bots' owners products get better placement, or so that ot…

I can see many bots falling into the two categories you describe, but I can also see many other bots that would not fit easily, and whose value is debatable.

For example, bots that scrape content for AI training; is that good or bad for a healthy economy? AI can be productive, but is it ‘stealing’ other’s productivity, which could hurt in the long term if it causes decrease in future human production because of diminished rewards?