LiveIntent Calls Its Graph "Authenticated Daily." It Authenticated a Bot Wearing a Name Tag.Pick

A peer-reviewed study presented at ACM's Internet Measurement Conference found that 17 of the 18 biggest identity vendors in programmatic handed IDs to the HTTP Archive crawler, a public research bot that announces itself in every request and has sat on the IAB Tech Lab's own Spiders and Bots list since 2013. Only Flashtalking answered "Bot." LiveIntent, ID5, Criteo, Experian's Audigent, The Trade Desk, PubMatic, OpenX and Magnite's Rubicon all issued it a lanyard.

This is not a clever fraud ring. It is the least stealthy bot on Earth, and its data sits in a free public database any vendor could have queried any day of the last three years. One Audigent ID followed it across 29,770 websites. 85% of LiveIntent's persistent IDs were shared by its phone and desktop crawls, two "devices" whose only connection is a Google Cloud IP pool. A cross-device graph made of server racks.

Here is why it keeps happening. An ID on a bid request raises the bid. Publishers adopted ID bridging for yield, vendors win on coverage, and nobody in the chain gets paid to return a blank. And the Media Rating Council says it does not audit or accredit identity providers at all. Kean Graham of MonetizeMore, whose LinkedIn graphic made the paper go viral, put it in seven words: "Nothing in their incentive structure punishes it."

In 2010 this site asked what counted as ad fraud and the industry shrugged. Sixteen years later it still can't agree on a definition. It has just gotten very good at pricing the bot as a person.