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More than half of all web traffic is now bots, according to Imperva's 2026 Bad Bot Report. Independent research shows verification tools still let some of them through as real people. Yet 80% of marketers optimize without verified purchase data, relying on the numbers the platforms report back.

Search is still where the people are. But as budgets move into Performance Max, search partner sites, programmatic and AI-driven channels, it gets harder to prove a person ever saw your ad, and the platform grades its own homework.

In episode two of The Hidden Budget, Seif Khemaissia of BrandPilot AI sits down with ad fraud researcher Dr. Augustine Fou to separate what the platforms report from what independent research finds. You'll learn:

You’ll learn:
  • How to tell a human click from a bot, and why a click on its own isn't proof
  • Where your search budget goes once it leaves Google Search, and what that traffic looks like
  • What seven independent studies say about bots, verification and self-reported performance
  • How to put a dollar figure on invalid traffic in your own accounts
  • How brands recover spend on invalid clicks as credits from the platform
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Chief Growth Officer, BrandPilot AI
Seif Khemaissia is Chief Growth Officer at BrandPilot AI, where he leads the company's mission to find the money hiding in ad budgets and give it back. He has spent 19 years in performance marketing and digital media, including senior leadership roles at GroupM/WPP, where he saw from the inside how platform economics quietly work against the advertiser. He has taught at Miami Ad School and advises brands across financial services, telecom and retail on media accountability, measurement and spend transparency. At BrandPilot AI he leads growth for the independent layer he always wished his clients had: AI that watches every auction and every click and recovers the spend that should never have left the account.
D
Founder, FouAnalytics
Dr. Augustine Fou is an independent ad fraud researcher and the founder of FouAnalytics, a media analytics platform that shows marketers where their ads actually ran and whether real people saw them. Before turning to fraud research, he spent his career on the buying side of digital marketing. He ran digital marketing for American Express's small business card division, led digital strategy as SVP at McCann's MRM Worldwide, and was Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom's Healthcare Consultancy Group, where he also ran search campaigns. He has taught digital strategy at NYU and Rutgers, and began his career at McKinsey & Company. Today he helps brands find and remove fraud from their campaigns, and is one of the industry's best-known independent voices on ad fraud.
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