Automated agents and bots now account for more than half of all web requests, per Cloudflare data reported by Digiday. GoFish's e-commerce clients saw bot traffic increase 80 per cent year-on-year on average; John Lewis reported AI agentic visits climbing from 0.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of all web sessions in a single year. The analytics damage extends beyond inflated impression counts into conversion infrastructure: bots are completing cart additions, newsletter signups, and purchase confirmation flows, triggering conversion events that analytics pipelines cannot distinguish from legitimate human behaviour. CPMs have risen approximately 20 per cent as advertisers narrow targeting parameters in attempts to filter contaminated audience data; multiple agencies report clients abandoning programmatic retargeting entirely in favour of retail media networks and social platforms where first-party data provides a reliable signal floor. Any measurement framework still relying on third-party pixel-based retargeting and conversion tracking without dedicated bot-filtering is likely overstating conversion performance by a margin that cannot be determined without bot-segmented analysis. The practical prescription: audit bot-filtered versus unfiltered conversion data in your analytics platform; treat audience segments built from third-party pixel retargeting as structurally degraded until validated against first-party data; and reconsider any programmatic retargeting campaign whose ROAS is calculated from pixel conversion data that has not been filtered for non-human sessions.