Bots create close to half — or about 48% — of all internet traffic across all web sites, according to Reid Tatoris, Distil Networks vice president of product outreach and marketing.

And while that number was published earlier this year, he underscored the enormity of fraudulent activity following the bot scheme that Google and White Ops, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, collectively worked to discover and then reveal this week.

Tatoris said the $29 million lost from the scheme pales in comparison to the totality of the problem.

“During Black Friday and Cyber Monday ecommerce sites saw a huge spike in bots,” he said. “One reason is companies write bots to scrape the prices of their competitors.”

These bots will hit a product page many times per day to scrape the information on the page. Each time the bot scrapes the page, it triggers an ad impression that counts against the total ad impressions served on the retailer’s site if it has an ad on the page, he said.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates online ad fraud costs advertisers $8.2 billion annually. Schemes like the one uncovered earlier this week by Google, White Ops and the Federal Bureau of Investigation increase the amount of bad bots, which Distil Networks estimates accounted for about 21% of web traffic in 2017, up 9.5% compared with the previous year.

Ad fraud is only one use for bots. “And even if we caught all the purposeful ad fraud, we would still have massive amounts of waste because all the bots purposely trying to create fraud cause an impression that an advertiser must pay for even when no one is on the page,” Tatoris said.

Tatoris said it’s not about catching every bot operator, because that’s not possible, but rather companies should be thinking about how to build and implement technology that would analyze every ad impression to identify whether or not it being served to a human being.

“That’s not being done,” he said. “Everybody wants to point a finger. This is a side effect of the way the ecosystem is built.”

The huge implication of viewing every ad is that revenue from the impression would disappear, he said.