I would definitely expect purchase tracking to be stricter than ad view metrics, yeah. And I know a lot of companies that used to have customer-friendly return policies have rolled back most or all of those policies (with or without non-enhshittification reasons). So I was at least partly joking, though I am getting less and less surprised about what bots are able to do. AI technology advancement just keeps accelerating.

Good point about brand awareness. In all seriousness, I think there’s psychological research suggesting that brand awareness is valuable in and of itself, though I think there’s a limit to how negative the publicity can be and still be valuable to brands. Otherwise, I don’t think there wouldn’t be the concept of “brand safety” for ad placement.

I feel like bots are basically the optimal tool for cheating automated systems, since it seems reasonable to fight automation with more automation, like the cat-and-mouse development race for captcha. I don’t have the technical expertise to back that up, though, just a general feeling that Murphy’s law applies to all engineering.