More than $63bn in global digital ad spend is wasted every year due to bot traffic and ad fraud, according to new research from bot detection platform Lunio.
Lunio’s 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report found that 8.51% of all paid traffic is invalid, encompassing bot activity, automated scraping, malicious competitor behaviour and accidental ad clicks.
That means that almost one in every 12 paid clicks does not come from a real person who could become a customer.
The report analysed more than 2.7 billion paid ad clicks across major platforms including Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Bing, covering activity between August 2024 and August 2025.
Nick Morley, CEO of Lunio, said invalid traffic remains one of digital advertising’s most significant hidden costs.
‘Invalid traffic is one of the biggest invisible drains on digital performance,’ he said. ‘Marketers trust platform metrics, but in reality, a meaningful share of what they’re paying for was never real engagement in the first place.
‘And when that noisy and polluted data feeds into automated bidding and targeting algorithms, the waste compounds even further.’
Among platforms, TikTok recorded the highest average invalid traffic (IVT) rate at 24.2%, meaning nearly one in four paid ad clicks showed signs of non-human or invalid activity.
Other social platforms also showed elevated exposure. LinkedIn recorded an average IVT rate of 19.88%, while X (formerly Twitter) stood at 12.79%.
Meta, perhaps surprisingly, performed best among major social platforms, with an average IVT rate of 8.2%. Google recorded the lowest rate overall in the dataset at 7.57%.
Geographically, invalid traffic was unevenly distributed. China recorded the highest IVT rate at 16.37%, followed by Brazil at 14.70%. Both figures were roughly double those seen in the US (8.44%) and the UK (7.97%).
India recorded the lowest IVT rate in the dataset at 5.5%. Lunio attributed this in part to India’s mobile-first, app-centric digital ecosystem, which is generally easier to validate than the open web.
Invalid traffic also varied significantly by sector. Gaming recorded the highest average IVT rate at 18.49%, which Lunio said reflects the combination of high-value transactions, sign-up bonuses and affiliate incentives that attract click farms and fraudulent activity.
Retail sat at the bottom of the table with an average IVT rate of 6.03%. However, Lunio warned that even relatively low levels of invalid traffic can have a significant impact on the sector due to tight margins.
With retail advertisers spending $83.09bn on digital ads in 2024, a 6.03% IVT rate equates to $5.01bn in wasted spend across the sector in a single year.
Main image created using Google Gemini
