Bot clicks steal up to 20% of your Google and Meta ad budget. BotRefund proves bot clicks, negotiates with Google and Meta, and gets your money back.

You launch a campaign. Bots interact with the ad, visit the site, click buttons, and sometimes even trigger conversion events. The platform sees engagement.

Then the algorithm does exactly what you asked it to do: find more people who behave like the people converting. Except some of the “people” were never people.

You do not only pay for the original bots. Your optimization algorithm can start using their behavior as a signal for where to spend the next dollar. If bots make up 30% of the first traffic, Meta and Google can learn from that contaminated sample and send more of the campaign toward traffic that looks like it. The campaign can be effectively poisoned before enough genuine buyers arrive.

This is how you get the CMO nightmare: the campaign starts great, something changes, and performance becomes inexplicably worse even though the creative, offer, landing page, and audience stay the same. When the bot share is only 5%, real human sessions dominate the early data and the platforms are more likely to learn from genuine prospects. Early bot traffic has an outsized effect because it can determine what the campaign learns to optimize for.

Ad-monitoring platforms are one reason these bots arrive so quickly. They track who is advertising, which audiences they target, when campaigns run, and what appears on the landing page. Some maintain 10,000–20,000 Facebook profiles to sample different audiences. They use these profiles to inspect new campaigns and collect intelligence that can later be sold. To avoid being blocked by Meta or Google, their bots use different identities, browser profiles, proxies, and human-looking actions—including clicks on forms, buy buttons, and other conversion controls.

Performance Max and programmatic campaigns can place your ads across thousands of publisher websites. When a publisher is paid for every click, the incentive is obvious: more clicks mean more revenue. Some publishers run armies of bots that watch and click ads at scale, turning your media budget into their income.

At $0.70–$1.30 per click, a bot operation can generate $2,000–$3,000 a day while the machine running it costs about $5 a day to host. Developers build and sell the bots, operators run the infrastructure, and publishers monetize the clicks. This is a multi-million-dollar industry that is doubling every year—and it only works while Google cannot recognize the traffic as invalid. If your PMax or programmatic spend is growing while incremental revenue and traffic quality do not, you need session-level proof.

Click fraud is not necessarily random criminals. It can be the business bidding against you. A legitimate-looking Google account can cost around $1.50 on the black market. In a simple example, 1,000 coordinated accounts clicking a $5 keyword can drain $5,000 in a single day.

Now imagine a lawyer paying $40 per click. A competitor spends $1,000 orchestrating activity that burns $10,000 of the lawyer’s daily budget. By 11 AM:

Your competitor does not need to steal your customers. They can make you disappear before those customers arrive, then use the same demand to double or triple their own sales. We have even seen this done by a human click farm in Venezuela, with people manually clicking US ads through US IP addresses. That makes the problem physical: a room full of people clicking your company’s $20 ads so your competitor can stay visible.

Your campaign targets California. Google reports a California visitor. The IP is residential and looks clean. But the browser says GMT+8, the system language is Chinese, and the device behavior repeats across dozens of supposedly different visitors.

A large share of traffic from India, Pakistan, China, or other Asian markets can be routed through US or European proxy IPs. Your analytics or bot-protection system catches the leak through the device time zone, language, locale, mouse movement, and repeated browser behavior: the IP says US or Europe, while the device behaves as if it is in China, Russia, or another Asian time zone.

You did not buy a California customer. You bought a disguise. Google and Meta can still charge you for the US or European click; they do not automatically stop billing because your own analytics can see the mismatch. They are paid when the click is sold. Your business is left with the wasted budget.