Nkosilathi Nyoni

I'm curious about everyone's experience with this: How much of your traffic is actually bots?

We've been seeing a pattern where teams are making campaign decisions based on analytics that are heavily skewed by bot traffic. It's not just the obvious stuff, it's fingerprinting, scrapers, and sophisticated traffic that looks legitimate at first glance. And it's poisoning conversion rates, skewing ROI, and making it impossible to trust dashboard data.

So here's what happened. We were running campaigns, watching our click metrics climb, feeling pretty good about performance. Then we started digging into where those clicks actually came from.

Half of them were bots.

Not simple ones either. Headless browsers mimicking human behavior perfectly. Selenium scripts automating clicks at scale. Click farms using mobile devices. Advanced stuff rotating IPs, spoofing geolocation, faking mouse movements, generating realistic referrer patterns. Fingerprinting evasion. Timing tricks. Some were so good they looked completely human.

We realized most link tools just count clicks. They don't ask if those clicks are real.

Do people actually trust link analytics anymore?

Between bots, privacy tools, and AI crawlers, it feels like click numbers are becoming less reliable.

When you run campaigns today, do you trust the click data you see, or do you assume some of it is noise?