The Ground Moved and Most People Never Noticed

Reminder: I'm going live Tuesday, August 25 at 12 PM ET. Register here.

The most-read article I ever wrote was a guide to filtering bots out of Google Analytics.

Millions of people found and read the article.

My position at the time was blunt: individuals could not win this fight. The platform had to fix problems like this, because chasing bots and installing your own filters was a game of whack-a-mole.

Fortunately, years later, Google Analytics did fix its bot problem, using a technique similar to what I suggested.

My assessment ended up being right, and the world moved on.

Bots are a completely different beast now

Using tools like Cloudflare, we can now see human versus non-human traffic more clearly than at any point in the history of the web.

In other words, the platforms are clearing the path for individuals to proactively understand the impact of bots on their traffic.

In June 2026, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince reported that automated traffic crossed 57.5% of all webpage requests, with humans at 42.5%.

First time in history that bots are the majority.

Prince predicted just a few months ago, in March 2026, that this wouldn’t happen until 2027.

Behind that 57.5% number is a real problem for measurement-focused marketers.

There are bots prefetching emails that quietly wreck open-rate data.

There are bots probing domains for vulnerabilities before any human ever visits.

There are browser-driven bots that are indistinguishable from a real visitor.

There are bots training their AI models on your data, sucking up valuable computing resources while ignoring your robots.txt file.

This is a whole different type of bot than the one I wrote about 10 years ago, in the article that drove millions of people to find a fix.

When I go live on August 25th, I’m going to show you what to look for, plus quick insights you can take to your company or clients to start a conversation about how the bot-web is affecting their marketing.

This is another emerging problem hiding in plain sight for marketers.

Just like in my last email about legal demand letters landing on agency desks over misconfigured consent… and the one before that about AI producing confident analysis from bad data…

These trends cost real money to fix once someone else finds them for you.

On August 25 we’re covering all of the leaks, and what to do about them.

We'll show you some tools you can use live and provide a checklist to prevent these leaks.

Register for the August 25 session.

To Your Measured Success!
–Jeff Sauer
CEO of MeasureU

P.S. The live session is Tuesday, August 25 at 12:00 PM ET. Free, open to everyone, with live Q&A at the end. Save your spot here.