I guess the answer is no, and there's a couple quotes in there near the end:
One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."
Next thing you know, the bots will learn how to purchase products, and we'll have come full circle.
I'd love to have an agent that goes online whenever I'm running low on toilet paper or something, browses all the stores and clicks all the ads, and automatically orders the best deal it can find.
By clicking on all the ads you're raising prices in the long run and just funneling money to google and meta, forcing the toilet paper companies to make scratchier tp to try and squeeze out more margin. My bhole would thank you for not doing this.
That's interesting. Drive ad value to zero or force them to start blocking crappy traffic. I think the issue is this could take us down the device attestation drm for the web path to discern legitimate traffic which is bad for the open web.
I certainly wouldn't want to be caught in that arms race where sites continually attempt to find sneaky ways to convince my agent to buy things I don't actually want.
I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic.
[0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate revenue or human ad views