Bots and automated agents now pass more than half of all web requests, and filtering them out pushes CPMs up because the real humans were always the expensive part. Cheap reach increasingly means bot reach. Australian advertisers on programmatic and retargeting should treat a rising post-filter CPM as a sign of a cleaner buy, not a worse one.
The Take: More than half of the traffic hitting websites is now bots and automated agents rather than people, and it is quietly lifting what advertisers pay. The awkward part is that cleaner targeting costs more per thousand, so the honest number looks worse than the inflated one. If your reporting rewards cheap reach, it is rewarding the bots.
Reality check: Bots and automated agents now pass more than half of all web requests, on Cloudflare data cited by PPC Land. When one agency tightened its retargeting to strip out suspect traffic, its average CPM rose 20%, because the real humans were always the expensive part of the pool. One media agency reported e-commerce clients seeing bot traffic climb 80% year on year.
Between the lines: Not all of it is waste. Some automated traffic is genuine. AI shopping assistants that research and buy can convert better than an average human visitor, and one founder in the same report wants more of that traffic. The work is separating agents that purchase from bots that burn budget, and most dashboards make no attempt to.
Share of web requests now coming from bots and automated agents rather than people
What to watch: As agents take over more browsing, a cheap impression stops meaning a human saw it. The metric that once proved reach now mostly proves activity, and activity is exactly what bots manufacture for free. Expect the platforms to start selling verification back to you as a paid add-on, which is its own quiet tax on the same problem.
For Australian operators: Australian advertisers running programmatic display or retargeting are exposed to the same invalid traffic, and non-video display advertising here grew to 2.2 billion dollars in FY26. Turn on invalid-traffic filtering and third-party verification on every programmatic buy. Ask your agency or platform what share of delivery is flagged invalid, and make that number part of every report. Judge campaigns on sales and qualified leads, not impressions or a low CPM. A CPM that rises after you filter is a sign the buy got cleaner rather than worse, and that is worth paying for.