More Than Half the "Traffic" You're Paying For Isn't Human — and iGaming Affiliates Are Most Exposed
Here's a number that should make anyone who runs paid traffic sit up straight: 57.4% of HTTP requests on the internet are now generated by non-human actors. Bots, scrapers, crawlers, automated tools — not people with wallets.
That stat has been floating around tech circles, but the iGaming and affiliate industry has been weirdly quiet about it. Which is odd, because we're the ones who pay per click, per registration, per deposit. We are literally the most exposed vertical on the internet when it comes to bot traffic.
Let's break down what this actually means in practice.
The three types of "bots" eating your budget
Not all non-human traffic is fraudulent. Search engine crawlers are bots. Monitoring tools are bots. Performance checkers are bots. But a significant chunk of that 57% is what the industry calls invalid traffic (IVT) — traffic designed to mimic human behavior just well enough to trigger affiliate payouts.
In iGaming, the fraud tree typically has three branches:
Click farms — low-cost, often manual operations that generate fake registrations. These are crude but still common in Tier 3 GEOs.
Sophisticated bots — scripts that complete full registration flows, sometimes even make small deposits and withdraw immediately. These are expensive to run but designed to pass basic fraud detection.
Proxy/VPN traffic — not bots per se, but users masking their real location to qualify for geo-restricted bonuses. Affiliates get charged; operators get churned players.
Why iGaming is uniquely vulnerable
Most industries where bots are a problem pay for impressions or clicks. A bot click wastes a few cents. In iGaming, affiliates often work on CPA models — $50, $100, $200 per qualifying deposit. A single sophisticated bot that completes a deposit cycle can cost a network thousands.
Beyond pure CPA fraud, there's the softer problem: bot traffic inflates your analytics. Your conversion rates look worse than they are. Your landing pages A/B test against a polluted sample. You optimize for the wrong things.
And increasingly, bot traffic isn't coming from obvious sources. It's mixed into otherwise legitimate campaigns — a practice sometimes called "traffic blending" — where a publisher pads real user volume with automated traffic to hit agreed-upon delivery numbers.
What's actually working right now
The industry has gotten better at catching the obvious stuff. But a few approaches are separating the operators who lose money on bot traffic from those who manage it:
Multi-event verification over single-event triggers. The shift from paying on first deposit to paying on deposit + session length + second deposit is annoying for affiliates, but it genuinely filters bots. Bots are cheap to run for one event. Running them through 20+ minutes of realistic casino behavior is economically unattractive.
GEO-level fraud benchmarking. Some GEOs have consistently higher bot contamination than others. Tier 3 markets — Southeast Asia, parts of Africa — often run 30-40% invalid traffic rates on certain ad networks. Knowing your baseline by GEO before you scale is basic hygiene now.
Network-level fraud scoring. The better affiliate networks have started integrating real-time fraud scoring APIs (TrafficGuard, HUMAN, Anura) into their tracking. If you're working with a network that doesn't do this, ask why.
The honest uncomfortable truth
Here's what the industry doesn't say loudly: some affiliate managers know their traffic has a bot component and don't push back hard because the volume looks good on reporting. Some operators know their conversion metrics are inflated but haven't invested in the fraud stack to fix it. The 57.4% bot-traffic statistic didn't appear overnight — it grew while everyone was focused on attribution and creatives.
The affiliates who will do well over the next few years are the ones treating traffic quality as a first-class metric — not an afterthought you check when a campaign mysteriously underperforms.
The tools exist. The data exists. The question is whether the incentive structures in affiliate marketing will ever fully align around actual humans, or whether we'll keep optimizing for numbers that bots are happy to provide.
