Bot traffic

A bot is a program that loads web pages automatically. Some are useful, such as search-engine crawlers and uptime monitors. Others are built to fake an audience: they open a page, scroll, pause and click as a person would.

In search arbitrage, bots appear in two ways. A traffic source may pad the visitors it sells with bots, so the arbitrageur pays a CPC for nobody. Or a fraudster runs bots through its own landers to click feed ads and collect revenue. Simple bots come from data-center traffic and are caught as GIVT. Advanced ones use a headless browser, real-looking fingerprints and residential proxies, or run on infected home devices in a botnet, and count as SIVT.

Warning signs: sessions with no mouse or touch movement, identical screen sizes and timings, traffic that arrives in perfectly even waves, and clicks that never convert for advertisers.

Bots do not buy insurance or hire lawyers. So even when they slip past filters at first, the advertiser's results expose them, and the cost returns as a clawback.

Think of it like this

It is like filling a cinema with mannequins. The seats look sold, but nobody is watching the film or buying popcorn.