AI bots consume 15% of unprotected ad clicks, DoubleVerify reports
DoubleVerify has introduced a new suite of AI verification tools, Agent ID Measurement and AI SlopStopper, designed to identify and block synthetic traffic from AI bots. The company claims these bots account for up to 15% of ad clicks in unprotected media, which can distort engagement metrics and inflate costs.
Key Takeaways
- Verification testing by DoubleVerify's Fraud Lab revealed that an ad click in certain research environments was 10 times more likely to originate from an AI bot than a human asset.
- DoubleVerify monitors and analyzes nearly two billion interactions monthly with both declared AI agents like Perplexity or ChatGPT and undeclared, evasive bots.
- Highly evasive scrapers that alter browsing credentials and simulate engagement patterns generate more than 10 million invalid impressions daily across news sites and retail media networks.
- The new Agent ID Measurement tool classifies declared and undeclared AI activity into general invalid traffic (GIVT) and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) respectively.
Why It Matters
Unchecked agentic traffic and automated scraping inflate digital coupon and ad engagement metrics without driving real customer conversions, draining valuable marketing budgets. As personal assistant browsers independently navigate checkout tunnels to evaluate and select brands, traditional models for campaign optimization and performance attribution become deeply distorted across the programmatic ad ecosystem. Marketers must observe whether verification networks can systematically differentiate high-value autonomous agent interactions from malicious traffic as autonomous consumer actions expand.
Additional Context
In November 2025, DoubleVerify officially launched its broader DV AI Verification platform, deploying pre-bid protection capabilities across more than 30 major programmatic marketplace systems including Amazon, Microsoft Invest, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo, per DoubleVerify's product announcements. While original features focused on cleaning up open-web display inventory, the application was intended to establish an operational benchmark for verifying how conversational chatbot environments interact with paid ad placements. In April 2026, DoubleVerify expanded this multi-platform stack by rolling out its AI SlopStopper for Social, per a company statement. The expanded system integrated automated signals—analyzing visual, audio, and metadata footprints—directly into pre-bid brand suitability workflows across leading social environments and streaming video networks such as YouTube. The update allowed media buyers to systematically filter out low-quality synthetic media that threatened to dilute brand positioning and deplete budgets. By June 2026, DoubleVerify unified these specific brand protections within a core architecture powered by its DV Neura engine, per a leadership interview reported by AdTechGod. Zagorski revealed that generative software has enabled bad actors to accelerate coordinated invalid traffic operations, leading to a 140% surge in Connected TV fraud during the first quarter of 2026 as automated engines were used to spin up thousands of shell sites and copycat streaming applications in minutes.
Read full article at doubleverify.com
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