Lunio, the invalid traffic (IVT) detection & prevention platform, surveyed 131 senior marketing leaders in May 2026, uncovering how budgets are being utilised, issues with click fraud and how the emergence of AI and automation will change campaign operations.

Key findings include: 

• Most marketers are experiencing IVT-related budget waste. More than three quarters (75.6 per cent) of surveyed marketers estimate that they lose more than 5 per cent of their monthly performance budget to invalid traffic (IVT), including bots, click farms, and accidental clicks. Almost half (48.1 per cent) lose 5-10 per cent of their monthly budgets to invalid traffic. Another 24.4 per cent estimate that their losses are between 11-20 per cent each month.
• Brands’ investment in Google Search leads to higher risk exposure. Google Search (35.9 per cent) is the platform that marketers feel has the highest risk for click fraud because it is where brands spend the most money, so the overall risk exposure is higher. TikTok and Meta (22.9 per cent each) had the next highest perception level of fraud, which is in line with previous findings.
• Automated campaigns increase exposure to invalid traffic. Nearly a third (29.8 per cent) of marketers openly suspect that automated campaign types like Google Performance Max or Meta Advantage+ are actively increasing their exposure to invalid traffic.
• Wasted budgets are marketers’ biggest IVT-related concern. Wasted budgets (24.4 per cent) due to invalid clicks are the most damaging to marketers, followed by wasted time for sales teams on bot-generated leads (22.9 per cent) and corrupted CRM data (22.1 per cent).

• Agentic AI traffic impacts algorithmic audience targeting. Automated bidding algorithms optimising towards non-human converters (51.1 per cent) and skewed retargeting lists (42 per cent) are the biggest risks associated with agentic AI traffic.

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Categories: Advertising, Articles, Research

Tags: google, IVT, lunio, meta, tiktok