Marketing fucked the internet.
Now, we’re all paying the price, literally.
If 62% of the web is automated, why are you still treating impressions like they’re real people?
Let’s be brutally honest. Your last marketing report was probably a work of fiction. Not because your team is lying, but because the platforms are.
According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, automated traffic has officially overtaken human activity.
We’ve crossed the Rubicon; humans are now the minority meatbags on the web.
Over 51% of traffic is bots, and when you filter for the town square of social media, that number regularly climbs north of 60%.
We funded this mess
Marketing departments have accidentally bankrolled the destruction of the very platforms they rely on.
By demanding infinite scale and lowest CPM (cost per mile), we forced social platforms to prioritise algorithm bait over human utility.
We incentivised the slop.
We rewarded influencers for gaming metrics rather than building communities.
The result? A feedback loop of bot-on-bot engagement that looks great on a spreadsheet but does fuck-all for your bottom line.
From reach to verified human density
We’re calling time on the "reach" hallucination.
If you’re reaching 100,000 "users" but only 38,000 are breathing, your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) isn't what you think it is.
It's effectively doubled.
The solution:
- Attribution hygiene: Stop looking at total hits. Use server-side tracking and bot-detection to find your Verified Human Density.
- Stop optimising for the feed: The feed is a bot-swamp. Start optimising for direct human channels.
- The "proof of human" metric: Shift your KPIs from views to high-intent actions, things a bot can’t (or won't) do, like joining a live Q&A or offering zero-party data.
The bottom lineYou can either keep paying for digital ghosts, or you can start marketing to the 38% of the internet that actually has a credit card.
