How much of my paid traffic is automated?

It varies enormously by industry and targeting, and the honest answer is that you cannot know until you measure your own. Published industry percentages describe other people's accounts and mostly count activity Google filtered before billing.

Do automated visits always cost me money?

No. Google does not bill for clients that declare themselves bots, nor for a paid URL opened a second time from somewhere else. Those are recorded as evidence and deliberately kept out of every cost figure.

Will a monitoring tool mistake a real visitor for a bot?

It can, which is why the bar is two independent signal types plus behavioural corroboration, why conversions clear a visit automatically, and why every finding shows its counter-evidence. Read it before acting.

Are small advertisers targeted deliberately?

Sometimes, particularly where each click is expensive and a daily budget is easy to exhaust. But assuming an attack before measuring is how people end up excluding their own customers.

How to Investigate Unusual Google Ads Visits Without Calling Every Bot a Fraudster

Why automated visits reach a landing page at all

The word "bot" covers wildly different things, and the differences are what matter to your budget:

Link previewers. Paste your ad URL into a messenger or social app and its servers fetch the page to build a preview card. Perfectly normal, and Google does not bill for it.
Search and SEO crawlers. Indexing your pages. Recognised and never assessed.
Monitoring and security scanners. Uptime checks, vulnerability scanners, your own tools.
Scrapers. Competitor price monitoring, content harvesters. Usually organic, occasionally landing on an ad URL they found.
Automation frameworks. Headless browsers driven by scripts. These are the ones worth a second look, because a browser that reports itself as automated has no ordinary reason to be arriving through a paid ad.

The first three are noise in the accounting sense: they cost nothing and should never appear in a figure that reads like money. ClickSheriff keeps them in a separate "never billed" ledger for exactly that reason — visible as evidence that measurement is working, absent from every cost figure.

How to tell them apart on your own traffic

Three questions, in this order.

Was it billed? The single most useful filter. A visit Google never charged for is not costing you anything, whatever it did on the page. Declared bots and re-opened ad URLs fall here.

Does it repeat? One odd visit is an anecdote. The same characteristics on nine separate days is a pattern, and patterns are what a monitor is actually good at recognising.

Does more than one signal agree? A hosting address alone means little. A hosting address and an instant exit with no interaction is a different claim. Two independent signal types is the bar ClickSheriff uses before calling anything strong.

What to do with the answer

Usually nothing. That is a legitimate outcome and the tool will say so plainly instead of inventing urgency. When a pattern does repeat on visits that were plausibly billed, the evidence view shows the signals, the daily history, and the arguments against the finding — conversions from the same address, real time on page, how few days it actually spans.

Only then does approving an address for exclusion make sense, and only as a deliberate act with a recorded reason. What you can do after a finding covers the options, including the ones that are not exclusions.

Not every bot is an attack.

Why automated visits reach a landing page at all

How to tell them apart on your own traffic

What to do with the answer

Straight answers.

Related reading.

Give your paid traffic a clear baseline.