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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

The average time on site and bounce rates I have got from advertising my software inside ChatGPT and Reddit are so terrible that I can only assume that most of the clicks I am paying for are fraudulent, although it is not clear who is doing the fraud.

https://successfulsoftware.net/2026/08/13/my-experience-buyi...

https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

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I have a hypothesis that that majority of ad clicks are misclicks where someone closes the new page within <1 second.

It is possible. But that would mean that chatgpt is doing something very shady with the ads.

On the reddit mobile app, the same action (tapping) that minimizes a comment also clicks through an ad, and ads are visually very similar to comments.

Many times a day, I will accidentally click on an ad when intending to minimize a comment.

Entirely accidental design by Reddit, I'm sure!

The answer is at every level, and each level is separated into multiple sublevels of fraud.

What is the motivation for someone (other than OpenAI) to fraudulently click on my ad in ChatGPT?

Many years ago I audited my friend's ~~AdWords~~ (I meant Google Search Ad) for his East Tennessee barn wedding venue. The local mom & pop SEO shop that set it up hadn't targeted any geo at all. Something like 60% of the clicks came from Malaysia, IIRC. CPC was around $2.

I could never figure out how that would work, or why. I mean, was Google actually doing this? That is hard to believe. But, who else would a have motivation to do that? I still have no idea what was going on there.

edit: I haven't dealt with ads forever, what I meant is the Google ads that appear in google search.

Google pays third-party websites to host advertisements, and shady website owners will put ads on such a website and bot clicks on it.

You can bid just on the ads that Google shows on its own website to avoid this.

I misspoke. I meant google search ads specificaly, not ads that appeared on 3rd party sites.

People click on irrelevant ads. It doesn't cost them anything.

I bid on "seating plan" for my seating planner software in Adwords and lots of people searching for "747 seating plan" and similar clicked on my ads, despite the ads clearly being nothing to do with that. (I fixed with with setting "747", "a320" etc as negative keywords).

I don't think this is sufficient to account for the terrible engagement from ChatGPT ads though, unless the targetting is just garbage.

But, yes, do set the correct geographic rea.

I have also audited other people's Adwords account. The horror.

You competitors?

I'm sure they have got better things to do.

It's fraud all the way down?!

Wouldn’t we have seen at least one whistleblower from Facebook or Google by now though?

I mean, paid traffic will almost always be worse than people actively seeking you out or finding you organically.

But I think there are definitely some opportunities for boosting your marketing/product strategy. Maybe ask ChatGPT for guidance on optimizing your advertising/marketing efforts?

I think there's enough low-hanging fruit (landing page that offers a free trial behind an email sign-up) that it'd probably help.

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