Lunio today announced the launch of its affiliate fraud detection product, a real-time system that screens every click and validates every conversion within affiliate programs before payouts are processed. The announcement, made on May 6, 2026, from New York, positions the company as one of the few dedicated invalid traffic detection platforms to build product capability specifically targeting the affiliate channel - a segment that has, until now, largely relied on network-level checks and manual investigations.

The scale of the problem Lunio is addressing is substantial. According to the company's announcement, 24% of all affiliate traffic is invalid. In the United States alone, $2.8 billion was lost to affiliate click fraud in 2025. Those figures draw attention to a channel that, despite being widely used as a performance growth driver, carries fraud exposure that has historically been difficult to quantify and harder still to prevent before commissions are paid out.

What affiliate fraud actually looks like

Affiliate marketing operates on a performance model: publishers and partners earn commissions when they drive clicks, leads, or sales to an advertiser. The structure is efficient in theory. In practice, it creates clear incentives for bad actors to game the system. According to the press release, the attack methods include bot-driven click farms, stolen user data, fake leads, and conversion hijacking - the last of which involves fraudsters intercepting a genuine user's journey and attributing the resulting conversion to themselves rather than the legitimate referring source.

Traditional defenses have not kept pace. Network-level checks - meaning the fraud detection tools built into affiliate networks themselves - and manual investigations often fail to catch these threats in real time. By the time a discrepancy surfaces during a payout reconciliation review, the commission has already been paid or is already in dispute. The evidentiary burden then falls on the advertiser to prove fraud retroactively, a process that is both slow and rarely conclusive.

This is not an isolated problem in one corner of digital advertising. PPC Land has tracked the broader invalid traffic issue across multiple channels and formats. A March 2025 investigation found that at least 40% of web traffic consists of fake users or automated bots, with leading fraud detection systems - including major third-party verification vendors - routinely failing to identify non-human activity even when bots openly identify themselves in request headers. The affiliate channel, which lacks the same density of third-party verification infrastructure found in programmatic display and video, has generally received less systematic scrutiny.

How Lunio's product works

According to the announcement, Lunio's affiliate fraud prevention product operates at the click and conversion level simultaneously. Every click that enters an affiliate program is screened in real time. Every conversion is validated before the payout cycle is triggered. The system flags and prevents fraud before commissions are disbursed, rather than relying on post-hoc analysis.

The technical design reflects a philosophy of pre-payment interception rather than post-payment dispute. That distinction matters commercially. Disputes with affiliate partners about fraudulent conversions are time-consuming, damage relationships, and do not always result in recovered commission costs. Blocking fraud before payout avoids all of those downstream costs entirely.

Lunio also builds an evidentiary layer into the flagging process. According to the announcement, every flagged click and conversion comes with clear, shareable evidence, which is designed to make disputes with partners faster and more fact-based when they do arise. That is an operational detail worth noting for affiliate program managers who have experienced the frustration of challenging a partner on suspected fraud without documentation sufficient to compel a resolution.

Simran Cashyap, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Lunio, described the product's purpose directly in the press release: "Without protection, affiliate programs become easy prey for fraud schemes designed to steal commissions, drain budgets, and distort performance data. Our affiliates fraud detection product ensures that every click and conversion is legitimate, giving advertisers the confidence they need to successfully run their affiliate and PPC campaigns and scale up without fear of fraud."

Lunio as a company

Lunio describes itself as a performance marketing efficiency platform that removes bots and fake ad engagements across paid marketing channels. According to the company's website, those channels include Google, Bing, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and others. The company's stated mission is to give every performance marketer access to reliable, transparent IVT detection - IVT standing for invalid traffic - that drives commercial results.

The leadership team includes Neil Andrew as Founder, Nick Morley as CEO, and Simran Cashyap as Chief Product and Technology Officer. The company has been rated a G2 Leader in its category and counts clients including Funding Circle, G Adventures, PandaDoc, and LearnWorlds among its users, according to its website. The affiliate fraud detection product announced today extends Lunio's scope beyond the paid search and paid social environments where most of its competitors are focused.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Affiliate marketing sits at an unusual intersection of paid performance and publisher economics. Advertisers allocate budgets to affiliate programs expecting incremental customer acquisition. Publishers and content sites depend on commission revenue. Fraud corrupts both sides of that equation - advertisers pay for activity that generates no customer value, while legitimate publishers see their traffic diluted by fraudulent sources competing for the same commission pool.

The $2.8 billion figure cited by Lunio for US affiliate click fraud in 2025 is specific to one geography and one year. Extrapolating to global affiliate spend suggests the total problem is considerably larger. The broader digital advertising industry has been fighting invalid traffic for years. A TAG study released in October 2024 found that industry anti-fraud programs saved advertisers an estimated $10.8 billion in US display and video channels in 2023 - equivalent to a 92% reduction in IVT-related losses compared to what those losses would have been without anti-fraud standards in place. Display and video have benefited from years of coordinated infrastructure development through bodies like the Media Rating Council, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, and IAB Tech Lab. Affiliate marketing has not had equivalent institutional infrastructure.

That gap creates both risk and opportunity. PPC Land has reported on rising IVT rates across social media platforms, with platforms like Facebook seeing estimated mobile app IVT rates of 10% in May 2024 according to Pixalate data. Affiliate traffic's 24% invalid rate, as cited by Lunio, sits well above even the more problematic social media benchmarks - a disparity that reflects the relative lack of enforcement infrastructure in affiliate networks compared to major social platforms.

For agency practitioners managing affiliate programs on behalf of advertisers, the product addresses a long-standing operational gap. Attribution accuracy is a persistent challenge in affiliate marketing even when fraud is not present. PPC Land has documented the attribution measurement complexity that arises when click fraud is layered on top of already-imperfect multi-touch attribution models. Fraudulent clicks and hijacked conversions contaminate the data sets that advertisers use to allocate future budget. When bad traffic skews toward certain partners or geographies, it corrupts optimization decisions across the entire program.

Context in a broader fraud landscape

The launch arrives against a backdrop of intensifying scrutiny of fraud across digital advertising channels. Meta has faced reporting that its platforms were projected to generate approximately 10% of 2024 annual advertising revenue - roughly $16 billion - from advertisements promoting scams and banned goods, according to internal documents reviewed by Reuters in November 2025. That figure, while specific to a platform-level problem rather than affiliate fraud, illustrates the scale at which fraud operates across digital advertising environments broadly.

HUMAN Security, another company working in the fraud detection space, announced in April 2026 that automation is growing eight times faster than human traffic, according to its 2026 State of AI Report. Most analytics platforms were designed for a human-centric internet and offer no structured view into how automated agents interact with digital properties. Affiliate tracking systems, many of which rely on redirect chains and cookie-based attribution, are particularly exposed to manipulation by automated agents that can simulate human browsing behavior at scale.

Lunio's approach - validating traffic and conversions at the point of origination rather than retrospectively - is consistent with the direction that fraud detection thinking has moved across the industry. PPC Land has documented how the MRC updated its IVT Detection and Filtration Standards in 2022, with new requirements including risk assessment by platform and traffic segment, decision-rate metric disclosure, and formalized requirements for machine learning use in IVT detection practices. Lunio's product, which screens traffic using an AI-powered detection algorithm, operates within that conceptual framework applied specifically to affiliate commerce flows.

Attribution and budget protection

The product's commercial framing emphasizes two distinct outcomes for affiliate advertisers: commission budget protection and attribution accuracy. These are related but not identical objectives. Budget protection means fewer fraudulent commissions paid out. Attribution accuracy means the data underlying program optimization is not distorted by invalid traffic patterns.

According to the announcement, the product enables affiliate advertisers to reward only incremental performance - meaning commissions flow to partners who drove genuinely new customer activity rather than those who intercepted or fabricated it. Strengthened attribution accuracy then allows advertisers to make better budget allocation decisions across their affiliate partner mix. Scaling affiliate investment without inflating fraud risk is described as the intended outcome.

Those claims rest on the effectiveness of real-time detection. The affiliate fraud landscape, like other corners of digital advertising fraud, is not static. Lunio acknowledges on its website that sophisticated invalid traffic is always evolving and that detection methods must evolve with it. The company says it has invested millions in developing a machine learning algorithm designed to identify suspicious agents with precision.

Channels supported and company scope

Lunio's existing platform covers paid search, paid social, display, and Performance Max campaigns across Google, Bing, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and additional channels. The affiliate fraud detection product announced today extends that coverage into a channel that operates differently from those environments - without the same intermediary infrastructure of demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and verification vendors that characterize programmatic advertising.

Timeline

  • 2022 - The Media Rating Council updates its IVT Detection and Filtration Standards, adding new requirements for machine learning use and decision-rate disclosure in invalid traffic detection
  • May 2024 - Pixalate data shows Facebook's estimated mobile app invalid traffic rate reaching 10%; WeChat hits 11%; social media IVT on the rise across platforms
  • October 9, 2024 - TAG releases study showing industry anti-fraud programs saved advertisers $10.8 billion in US display and video channels in 2023, representing a 92% reduction in potential IVT losses
  • March 2025 - Adalytics investigation, covered by PPC Land, reveals major verification systems routinely miss declared bots, with at least 40% of web traffic consisting of fake users or bots
  • November 6-9, 2025 - Reuters reporting and PPC Land coverage reveal Meta internally projected earning approximately 10% of its 2024 annual revenue from scam ads
  • 2025 - $2.8 billion lost to affiliate click fraud in the United States, according to Lunio
  • April 21, 2026 - HUMAN Security announces AI agent traffic is growing 8x faster than human traffic; expands fraud detection capabilities to marketing and commerce teams
  • May 6, 2026 - Lunio announces the launch of its affiliate fraud detection product in New York, designed to screen every click and validate every conversion in real time before payouts occur

Summary

Who: Lunio, an AI-powered ad fraud detection and performance marketing efficiency platform founded by Neil Andrew and led by CEO Nick Morley, with Simran Cashyap serving as Chief Product and Technology Officer.

What: The launch of a dedicated affiliate fraud detection product that screens every click and validates every conversion from affiliate sources in real time, flagging and preventing fraud before commission payouts are processed. Every flagged event includes shareable evidence to support partner disputes.

When: Announced on May 6, 2026, from New York.

Where: The product applies to affiliate marketing programs globally and is accessible through Lunio's platform at lunio.ai. The company operates across paid channels including Google, Bing, Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Why: 24% of all affiliate traffic is invalid, according to Lunio. In the United States alone, $2.8 billion was lost to affiliate click fraud in 2025. Traditional network-level checks and manual investigations fail to catch fraud in real time, leaving advertisers paying commissions for activity that delivers no genuine customer value. The product addresses the gap between affiliate marketing's scale as a performance channel and the relative lack of institutional fraud prevention infrastructure compared to programmatic display and video advertising.

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