Bots Are Getting Past Almost Everyone's Front Door
DataDome tested 21,491 sites with ten automated visitors each. Full protection, meaning all ten got blocked, showed up on only 2.4% of them. On 65.3% of sites, every single bot walked right in. Meanwhile AI-driven requests to login pages jumped 8x in six months. That's not a security footnote. That's your ad platform's front door standing wide open while the traffic behind it gets weirder by the week.
Here's why that matters for a leasing budget specifically. Your Google and Meta campaigns are optimizing toward cost-per-lead, and your CRM is counting every form fill as a human who might sign a lease. If bot traffic is clicking ads, landing on your property site, and occasionally filling out a contact form because some scraper is testing what happens, your CPL looks worse than it is, your lead volume looks better than it is, and nobody upstream can tell the difference just by staring at a dashboard. Your reporting isn't lying to you. It's just not equipped to know the difference between a renter and a script.
The uncomfortable part is that most vendors will nod along and say they've got bot filtering handled, the same way most sites in that study probably assumed they had protection until someone actually ran ten test bots at them. Assuming isn't a strategy. Numbers are.
- 01What percentage of our paid clicks last month did your bot filtering flag and exclude before they hit our CPL calculation?
- 02Which specific bot detection vendor or method are you using on our Google and Meta campaigns, and when was it last updated?
- 03Show me our click-through rate and our lead-to-tour conversion rate side by side for the last 90 days. What's the gap, and why?
- 04Do you filter bot traffic before it's counted as a click, or only after it's already counted and billed?
- 05How many leads in our CRM last quarter came from IP ranges or user agents you've since identified as automated?
- 06If we ran ten known bot signatures against our own site and forms today, how many would get through?
Source: PPC Land, September 26, 2026
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