The Cost of Fake Clicks: How Bot Traffic Drains Small Businesses and Enriches Platforms

This work evaluates how bot-driven engagement and click fraud distort digital advertising ecosystems, causing small businesses to pay for interactions that never originate from humans. The analysis highlights the structural incentives that encourage large platforms to tolerate synthetic traffic, inflating engagement metrics while advertisers absorb the financial losses. The piece calls for greater transparency and improved bot detection across advertising networks.

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