>but if you had headless browsers loading the ads on your site no one would be able to tell that those views were not from real users.
There is literally nothing in the world I care about less than this.
There is literally nothing in the world I care about less than this.
Advertisers pay publishers to show their ads to real users. Publishers run their sites because they receive money from advertisers. We visit the sites because they're diverting/informative/useful/etc. If the advertisers can't tell whether their ads are instead shown to robots, the whole thing falls apart.
I like the trust tokens proposal as a way to exclude bot traffic without tracking: https://web.dev/trust-tokens/