More than three-quarters of senior marketers estimate that invalid traffic takes over 5% of their monthly performance budget, yet only 5.3% operate a dedicated tool to stop it, according to survey findings released by Lunio on July 15, 2026.

The gap between alarm and action is the central finding of The State of Click Fraud Report 2026, a survey of 131 senior marketing leaders fielded in May 2026 by the invalid traffic detection company. Concern is close to universal. Spending on prevention is not. Lunio labels the distance between the two the 95% execution gap, a reference to the share of respondents who acknowledge the problem while running no dedicated defence against it.

Invalid traffic, or IVT, covers any click, impression or conversion that does not originate with a person who has genuine intent. According to the report, that definition spans coordinated bot activity, automated scraping, malicious competitor behaviour and accidental clicks. Not all of it is malicious. All of it, in the company's framing, is wasteful.

What the survey measured

The respondent base skewed toward brand-side marketers, who made up 74% of the sample, with agency marketers accounting for the remaining 26%. Among in-house respondents, retail was the largest category at 20.6%, followed by education at 14.4% and consumer technology at 13.4%. Agency respondents clustered differently: retail at 38.2%, B2B technology at 35.3% and consumer technology at 26.5%.

Performance marketing absorbs a substantial share of those budgets. According to Lunio, 29.8% of respondents put 11% to 25% of total budget into performance channels, 24.4% allocate 1% to 10%, and 23.7% allocate 26% to 50%. A small group, 2.3%, directs more than three-quarters of spending there. Another 14.5% report allocating nothing at all.

Those allocations are set to rise. Almost half of respondents, 48.9%, expect to increase performance budgets slightly in 2026 against 2025, while 22.9% expect an increase of 10% or more. Only 5.4% anticipate any decrease. The report summarises the combined increase figure as 70.8%, although the two chart values it publishes add to 71.8%, a minor inconsistency in the underlying document.

Where the money goes

The headline loss estimate comes from a single question about monthly budget lost to bots, click farms or accidental clicks. Nearly half of respondents, 48.1%, put the figure at 5% to 10%. A further 24.4% estimate losses of 11% to 20%, and 3.1% put losses above 21%. Adding those bands produces the 75.6% who lose more than 5%. Below that threshold sit 15.3% of respondents. Another 9.2% concede they do not track the number at all.

Lunio converts the percentages into a worked example. A company spending $5,000,000 a year would lose between $250,000 and $500,000 annually at the most common loss band, according to the report, with exposure at the upper end of the distribution reaching $1,500,000.

Wasted media is not the only cost respondents flagged, and the margins separating the categories are narrow. Budget spent on non-converting clicks was named most damaging by 24.4%. Sales team time lost to bot-generated lead forms followed at 22.9%, then corrupted CRM data at 22.1%. Junk traffic feeding misleading signals into automated campaign types was cited by 16.0%, and skewed return-on-ad-spend and cost-per-acquisition metrics by 14.5%.

That distribution places roughly 45% of the perceived damage outside the media budget itself, in sales operations and data infrastructure. It echoes findings published in May 2026, when research from the Affinity Solutions Outcomes Marketing Council found that more than two-thirds of 210 senior marketers estimated at least 11% of media budgets were lost to optimisation lag, with 91% believing platform-reported results were overstated.

The reinvestment question

Asked where they would put a reclaimed 15% of wasted ad spend, respondents pointed first at social media, chosen by 45.8%. Paid media channels including paid search came second at 29.8%. Linear or streaming television drew 16.0%, and retail media networks 8.4%.

The report frames this as an opportunity cost rather than a simple loss, arguing that marketers are losing not only budget but the capacity to scale channels that already work.

Which platforms carry the perceived risk

Google Search was named the highest-risk environment for click fraud by 35.9% of respondents, well ahead of any other channel. Meta and TikTok tied at 22.9% each. Google Display Network drew 8.4%, LinkedIn 6.9%, programmatic and native display 2.3%, and Bing Search a single response at 0.8%.

The report is explicit that this reflects exposure rather than measured fraud rates: Google Search ranks first because it is where the most money sits, so the absolute risk is larger. That distinction matters when the perception data is set against measurement data. Lunio's own Invalid Traffic Impact Report, covered on June 13, 2026, analysed 64 million clicks in monitor-only accounts and found LinkedIn recording the highest platform-level invalid traffic rate in the dataset at 17.62% for the first quarter of 2026, climbing from 13.00% in the third quarter of 2025. LinkedIn ranked fifth in the perception survey.

The conclusion of the new report cites a further Lunio study, the 2026 Global Click Fraud report, putting average IVT rates at 24.2% for TikTok and 19.88% for LinkedIn. Those figures are not directly comparable with the June analysis, which used a different sample, period and methodology.

Concern intensity is high without being uniform. On a ten-point scale, 51.1% of respondents placed their concern about click fraud at 8, 9 or 10, and 24.4% selected the maximum. Monitoring behaviour tracks that anxiety: 57.3% say they check for evidence of click fraud routinely when evaluating campaigns, while 29.8% investigate only occasionally.

Automation and the ghost converter problem

The most striking numbers in the survey concern what marketers think automation is doing to their traffic quality. Nearly a third, 29.8%, suspect that automated campaign types such as Performance Max or Meta Advantage+ are actively increasing their exposure to invalid traffic.

Asked to select up to two risks associated with agentic AI traffic that most threaten their 2026 strategy, 51.1% chose automated bidding algorithms optimising toward non-human converters, described in the report as ghost converters. Skewed audience personas and retargeting lists followed at 42.0%. Inflated top-of-funnel metrics giving a false sense of campaign success drew 30.5%, and sales teams working through form fills generated by agents 21.4%.

The mechanism the report describes is a feedback loop rather than an outright theft of budget. Bots generate interaction and conversion signals that look legitimate to bidding systems. Those systems then seek out more of the same traffic. The corruption compounds inside the optimisation layer rather than sitting visibly in a cost column.

Concern about that scenario is broad: 85.6% report being at least somewhat concerned about agentic AI and invalid traffic rates, with 29.8% selecting the highest point on a five-point scale.

Detection confidence is thinner than the concern

Confidence in the tooling does not match the level of worry. Asked whether their current technology stack can distinguish a high-intent human from an autonomous AI agent performing browsing, clicking and form-filling, 41.2% said they were only somewhat confident. Another 19.1% said they were not very confident, and 6.1% said they do not believe their tools can see AI agents at all. A third, 33.6%, described themselves as very confident.

There is a further inconsistency inside the responses. When the same population was asked how concerned they are that autonomous agents with no purchase intent are poisoning conversion signals and smart bidding, the concern softened: 33.6% were only slightly concerned and 7.6% not concerned at all, against 11.5% who were extremely concerned. Marketers rate the strategic threat from ghost converters highly in the abstract, then rate the specific mechanism that produces them as a secondary worry.

The external evidence has been moving in one direction. Cloudflare Radar data for the week ending June 5, 2026 showed bots accounting for 57.4% of web traffic to HTML content, with human visitors at 42.6%. HUMAN Security's May 2026 benchmark recorded agentic traffic falling 4.3% month over month while the rate at which sites block it rose to nearly 9%.

The trust and adoption gap

Awareness, not scepticism, appears to be the binding constraint on prevention spending. More than half of respondents, 53.5%, report little or no knowledge of dedicated IVT prevention platforms. Only 5.3% currently use one.

Where marketers do place trust, they place it in the platforms selling them the media. According to the report, 39.7% believe major advertising platforms handle invalid traffic prevention sufficiently, and that belief is the single most cited barrier to adopting a dedicated solution, ahead of lack of budget at 30.5%, difficulty proving the return on saved spend to leadership at 19.1%, and lack of technical bandwidth at 10.7%.

That trust is not evenly distributed. Asked to rate confidence in the invalid click credits returned by Google and other major platforms on a ten-point scale, 38.9% of respondents selected 4 or below, with 12.2% choosing the lowest possible score. The distribution is bimodal rather than uniformly negative: 16.8% selected 10, and 16.0% selected 8.

The credits themselves became more visible earlier this year. Google published help documentation for its Invalid Activity Credit Report for the first time in mid-2026, setting out adjusted metrics and credited clicks for Search and Performance Max campaigns. Advertiser scepticism about platform self-reporting has also been reinforced by demonstrations of how native controls can fail. In April 2026, a Spanish agency showed that Google Ads IP exclusion lists could be bypassed by separating the address that harvests a valid click identifier from the address that later spends it.

What persuades a CFO

The survey also asked what would unlock procurement. Improvement in the lead-to-marketing-qualified-lead ratio was named the most persuasive metric for CFO approval by 37.4% of respondents. Total recovered budget followed closely at 34.4%. Reduction in customer acquisition cost drew 22.1%, and mitigation of data privacy and compliance risk 6.1%.

The ordering is notable. Recovered media spend, the most intuitive pitch for a fraud prevention product, ranks second to a pipeline quality metric that sits outside the media budget entirely.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Three structural pressures converge in this dataset, and none of them is new on its own.

The first is measurement. Invalid traffic has been reported at elevated levels across formats through 2026. Integral Ad Science found on July 10, 2026 that ad fraud and low-quality inventory did not fall as far as seasonal patterns predicted during the FIFA World Cup, staying around 30% above forecast. Lunio's own vertical work, published July 7, 2026, put wasted spend for a representative banking and lending advertiser at roughly $295,000 a year against a 5.92% category IVT rate.

The second is automation. Automated campaign products consolidated their share of budget over the past three years while offering advertisers reduced visibility into placement and traffic quality. Google has added reporting layers in response, beginning with the channel-level performance data announced for Performance Max on April 30, 2025. The survey suggests those additions have not settled the underlying question for a meaningful share of buyers.

The third is trust in platform-reported numbers, a theme running well beyond click fraud. A survey of 120 senior marketers published on July 9, 2026 found only 33% fully trust platform-reported connected television performance claims, with more than 60% concerned about fraud or misrepresented inventory. The same tension surfaced in coverage of invalid traffic on YouTube, where creators receive limited detail on how it is identified or deducted.

Set against those pressures, the 5.3% adoption figure is the number most likely to shape budget conversations. It suggests that the market for dedicated verification remains early rather than saturated, and that the constraint is knowledge and internal justification rather than an assessment that the problem has been solved.

Lunio, which sells invalid traffic detection and prevention, has an evident commercial interest in the conclusion its report reaches. The individual data points, however, sit close to independent measurements published by verification vendors, trade bodies and infrastructure providers through the first half of 2026. What the survey adds is the buyer-side view: the share of marketers who believe the problem is severe, the much smaller share doing anything specific about it, and the metric they say would close that distance.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Lunio, an invalid traffic detection and prevention platform, surveyed 131 senior marketing leaders, split between brand-side marketers at 74% and agency marketers at 26%.

What: The State of Click Fraud Report 2026 finds that 75.6% of respondents estimate losing more than 5% of monthly performance budget to invalid traffic, while only 5.3% use a dedicated IVT prevention platform and 53.5% report little or no knowledge of such tools. Further findings include Google Search named the highest-risk channel by 35.9%, automated bidding toward non-human converters cited as the top agentic AI risk by 51.1%, 38.9% expressing low trust in platform-issued invalid click credits, and improvement in the lead-to-MQL ratio named the most persuasive CFO metric by 37.4%.

When: The survey was conducted in May 2026 and the findings were released on July 15, 2026.

Where: The research covers performance marketing budgets across Google Search, Google Display Network, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bing Search and programmatic display, with respondents drawn primarily from retail, education, consumer technology and B2B technology categories.

Why: Performance budgets are rising, with 70.8% of respondents planning increases in 2026, at the same time as automated campaign products and agentic AI traffic make it harder to verify who is generating clicks and conversions. The survey quantifies a gap between the number of marketers who consider invalid traffic a critical problem and the far smaller number running independent verification against it.