Most marketers believe invalid traffic is taking a real slice of their paid budget, and almost none of them run software built to stop it. That gap is the headline of the State of Click Fraud Report 2026, a survey of 131 senior marketing leaders published by Lunio, a company that sells invalid traffic prevention software. PPC Land wrote it up on 27 July 2026.
Two figures carry the story. 75.6% of respondents estimate they lose more than 5% of monthly performance budget to invalid traffic. 5.3% say they currently use a dedicated invalid traffic prevention tool.
Who paid for the research
Start there, because it changes what the numbers are worth. Lunio sells invalid traffic prevention. The report it published concludes that the market badly underuses invalid traffic prevention. That is not a scandal and it does not make the survey worthless, but the findings point in a direction the publisher benefits from. Read it as an argument with data attached rather than as neutral measurement.
The second thing to hold on to: none of the headline percentages come from measurement. Respondents were asked what they think they lose and what worries them. So the accurate reading is "75.6% estimate losing more than 5%", not "75.6% lose more than 5%". No account was audited for this report.
The sample is 131 people, surveyed in May 2026. 74% work brand side, 26% at agencies, and retail is the largest single category. At that size, a few percentage points either way mean very little.
What the survey found
- 75.6% estimate losing more than 5% of monthly performance budget to invalid traffic.
- 5.3% currently use a dedicated invalid traffic prevention platform.
- 53.5% report little or no knowledge of that category of software at all.
The report also puts the estimate into currency. On a $5 million annual budget it puts the loss at $250,000 to $500,000 at typical rates, and as much as $1.5 million at the upper end of its range. That is the vendor's own arithmetic applied to the vendor's own loss assumptions, so treat it as illustration rather than as a bill somebody has verified.
The automation finding is the one worth thinking about
51.1% of respondents named automated bidding optimizing toward non-human converters as their top concern about automation. 29.8% suspect that running automated campaigns increases their exposure to invalid traffic in the first place.
The mechanism behind that worry is easy to state. Smart Bidding and its equivalents learn from the conversion data you feed them. If low-quality or non-human traffic produces events the platform records as conversions, the model has no way to know they are worthless. It sees a pattern that converts and bids harder into it. The waste then compounds, because the algorithm is actively buying more of what was already wasted spend.
Worth repeating that this is what marketers said they are worried about. The survey did not measure whether it is happening. The concern is coherent though, and it is a reason to care about conversion quality inside a Google Ads account rather than only conversion volume.
Where marketers think the risk sits
Respondents were also asked which platforms they perceive as riskiest. These are opinions, not incident rates:
| Platform | Perceived risk |
|---|---|
| Google Search | 35.9% |
| Meta | 22.9% |
| TikTok | 22.9% |
| 6.9% |
That ordering looks a lot like a ranking of where performance budget usually goes. People notice problems in the channel they spend most on and watch most closely, which is a reason to be careful about reading the table as a measure of which platform actually has the worst bot problem.
What this means for Thai marketers
The report contains no Thailand-specific data, and there is no reliable public figure for invalid traffic on Thai accounts, so nobody should be quoting a Thai percentage off the back of it. What does travel is the order of operations: check your own conversion data before buying anything to fix it.
Several things are visible without extra tooling. Look at which conversion actions are set as primary and feeding the bid model, because dead or duplicated goals distort learning about as effectively as bots do. Compare conversion rates by network, device, placement and geography, and see whether one segment produces conversions that never turn into revenue or a real enquiry. If the account runs Search Partners or Display, read the placement reports on their own rather than inside the blended account average. All of that depends on clean measurement, which is why a properly configured GA4 setup earns its keep long before any anti-fraud purchase does.
Thai budgets are usually a long way below the $5 million example in the report, which cuts both ways. The absolute loss is smaller, and so is the tolerance for it.
Common questions
Does the report prove 75.6% of advertisers are losing money to bots?
No. It says 75.6% of 131 surveyed marketers estimate that they are. Estimates and measurements are different things, and the report does not present account-level measurement.
Is it a reason to buy invalid traffic software?
It is a reason to look at your own numbers. A survey published by a vendor in the category is weak grounds for a purchase in that category. Anything found in your own conversion data is stronger.
Is Google Search genuinely the riskiest channel?
The 35.9% figure is perception, not incidence. It tells you where marketers are worried, which usually tracks where they spend.
If invalid traffic is teaching a bid strategy the wrong lesson, it shows up in conversion quality before it shows up in any report. Reviewing measurement and conversion tracking is the cheaper place to start.
