Over the past few weeks, we have noticed a huge uplift in bot form fills, fake enquiries and unusual traffic patterns across paid advertising campaigns. It turns out, we weren't the only ones!!!
This has been especially noticeable on Meta.
At first, we were not completely sure what we were looking at. A few poor-quality leads can happen in any campaign. A few strange enquiries can slip through. That is normal.
But as the days have gone on, the volume has become impossible to ignore.
It is not isolated to one client, one campaign or one form. We are seeing it across multiple accounts, and even our own Wise ads have been hit by bot activity.
In simple terms: more bots are browsing, clicking, filling in forms and wasting ad budget and ad platforms are letting it happen!! I'll let you take a guess as to why 🙂
Today (04/06/2026), Cloudflare's CEO, whose company powers 25% of the web, announced ‘Bots have now passed human traffic online’ and how he didn't expect this to happen so fast.
01.Why This Matters
This is not just an annoying reporting issue.
It is an investment risk.
If a click costs £7, and a large percentage of those clicks are not real people, then businesses are paying for traffic that was never going to become a patient, customer or genuine enquiry.
That is the problem.
Platforms like Meta and Google have extraordinary technology, data and resources behind them. Yet bots are still getting through. They can browse feeds, click ads, interact with websites, fill in forms and drain budget before a human has even had a chance to enquire.
That creates a difficult question for every advertiser: how much of your paid traffic is actually human?
02.The Bigger Picture
This is happening during a very strange time for technology, marketing and the wider internet.
AI has accelerated dramatically over the past few months. It is moving into search, content, customer service, automation, data scraping and online behaviour at a pace that is hard to keep up with.
That creates huge opportunities.
But it also creates serious pressure for advertisers.
Cloudflare, one of the biggest internet infrastructure companies in the world, has spoken openly about the rise of AI bots and automated traffic. Recent industry reporting also suggests automated traffic now makes up more than half of global internet traffic, with bad bot traffic becoming a major part of the problem.
That is a big shift.
The internet was built around the assumption that there is a person on the other side of the screen. Increasingly, that assumption is breaking.
For advertisers, that means a very real challenge: you can have the right offer, the right website, the right ad creative and the right budget, but still lose money if too much of the activity is automated.
More traffic does not always mean better traffic.
Right now, the priority is not just generating more clicks. It is protecting the quality of the enquiries that make it through.
See what we’re changing →03.What We Are Doing
We have been analysing this heavily across client accounts.
The next step is to make it harder for bots to complete forms and waste more budget.
We are now adding stronger protection to form journeys, including options such as phone verification, code-based checks and additional friction before an enquiry can be submitted.
That may mean asking users to verify their phone number before a form goes through.
It may also mean reducing autofill behaviour, tightening form logic, improving validation and making forms harder for automated systems to complete at speed.
The goal is simple: keep the form easy enough for genuine people, but harder for bots.
There is always a balance. Too much friction can reduce genuine enquiries. Too little friction lets bots flood the system. So we are taking a measured approach and prioritising protection where we are seeing the biggest issues.
We are aiming to have these additional protections in place by tomorrow.
04.Final Word
This is a rough time to be advertising online.
It is an even rougher time to be managing online advertising on behalf of businesses that rely on the quality of their enquiries.
AI is changing the internet quickly. Bot traffic is increasing. Platforms are not moving fast enough. And advertisers are often the ones left paying for the mess.
We are not ignoring it.
We are watching it closely, analysing the data, tightening the systems and doing everything we can to protect performance across the accounts we manage.
There are a lot of straws being added to the marketing camel’s back at the moment.
But rest assured, we are on it.
We are working hard to stay ahead of this, protect budgets where possible and keep improving the quality of enquiries coming through for our clients.