--- title: "Half The Traffic Was Not People" dek: "An internal audit of 41 million sessions classified 51.2 per cent as machine traffic that did not declare itself. Its last line recommends not restating the methodology externally. One exchange, one quarter — and the confidence bands are undefined." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: The Signal author: Dev Rajagopal (fictional) published: 2026-08-02T13:00:00Z updated: 2026-07-02T13:20:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/dead-internet-traffic-audit tags: dead internet, advertising, bots, traffic, measurement genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Half The Traffic Was Not People *An internal audit of 41 million sessions classified 51.2 per cent as machine traffic that did not declare itself. Its last line recommends not restating the methodology externally. One exchange, one quarter — and the confidence bands are undefined.* The table is nine lines long. It is the last line this newspaper has spent three months on. **Document: PX-1612 — summary of findings, internal** ``` sessions sampled ........................ 41,220,881 classified human, high confidence ....... 12.1% classified human, low confidence ........ 19.4% classified non-human, declared .......... 8.8% classified non-human, undeclared ........ 51.2% unclassifiable .......................... 8.5% :::figure ``` RECOMMENDATION: do not restate methodology externally. ::: ## What the numbers are and are not Fifty-one point two per cent of 41 million sampled sessions at one mid-sized advertising exchange, over one quarter of last year, were classified by the firm's own systems as machine traffic that did not identify itself as machine traffic. That is the finding. It is narrow. When this story first ran, the headline on it was "Most Of The Internet Is Not Human, Audit Finds", and that headline was wrong in a way this newspaper's first standing rule exists specifically to prevent. The audit sampled one exchange's inventory. It says nothing whatever about the internet. The headline was changed within forty minutes and the note explaining it is permanent, along with the change we made to our headline procedure as a result. ## The statistician we hired Professor Halina Doyle-Achebe reviewed the audit's method for us and was told before she began that we would publish her review either way. She found the sampling frame sound and the sample size more than adequate. She found the classifier's confidence bands undocumented — the document reports "high confidence" and "low confidence" without defining either — and said this was the single largest weakness in the paper. "If you cannot tell me what high confidence means, I cannot tell you what twelve point one per cent means," she wrote. "I can tell you it is a number that was produced by a consistent process. That is not nothing and it is also not what your readers will think it is." Corina Baptiste-Ng, who supplied the document, did not build the classifier and could not define the bands either. ## Why we hid the name We removed the firm's name and two staff names from [[PX-1612]]. Our source did not ask us to; she would have been content for us to print them. We did it for a reason we want on the page rather than in a policy document: we could not satisfy ourselves that this exchange is worse than its competitors, and naming the one company whose paperwork we happen to hold would have told readers something we do not know — that this is a story about a firm, rather than about a measurement problem. Two competing exchanges told us on background, with an editor knowing their identities, that their own undeclared-machine figures were "in the same order". Neither would give us a number. We are not printing a number nobody gave us. Readers may think this was the wrong call. It is a call, made by named people, and it is on this page rather than buried. > If you cannot tell me what high confidence means, I cannot tell you what twelve point one per cent means. > > — Prof. Halina Doyle-Achebe ## The last line The recommendation not to restate the methodology externally is, the firm says, a commercial instruction about a classifier it does not want to describe to competitors. That is a completely plausible reading and this newspaper reports it as such. It is also the case that the instruction sits directly beneath a table showing that a majority of measured sessions were not people, in a business that sells attention by the impression, and it is not unreasonable for a reader to notice the adjacency. Both of those sentences are true at once. This story is the second one because the first one is already printed above it, in full, in the firm's own words. ## Sources (invented) - Corina Baptiste-Ng, Former measurement engineer at the firm — Interviewed in person three times; supplied the audit and her employment contract so we could establish what she was permitted to disclose (March – May 2026) - The firm, A mid-sized advertising exchange — Written questions submitted 19 May 2026; response received 9 June (May–June 2026) - Prof. Halina Doyle-Achebe, Statistician, retained by this newspaper to review the audit's method — Written report, commissioned and paid for by They Buried (Report dated 2 June 2026) - Two competing exchanges, Named in our notes; both spoke on background with an editor's knowledge of their identities — Telephone (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1612: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1612 ## What we could not confirm - Whether this exchange is typical. It is one exchange, one quarter, one inventory mix. - What the firm's own current figure is. It declined to give one. - The precise definition of 'high confidence' in the audit's classifier. The document does not define it and the engineer who supplied it did not build that component. ## Right of reply **The exchange (name withheld by They Buried)** (The firm responded on 9 June 2026 through counsel and asked that its statement be printed in full. It is.): > The document you describe is a genuine internal working paper. We are not going to pretend otherwise and we are not going to thank you for having it. > > We would ask your readers to understand three things about it. > > First, 'undeclared non-human' is a category that includes a great deal of ordinary, benign, and entirely disclosed activity: prefetchers, accessibility tooling, security scanners, cache warmers, and the crawlers of companies whose crawlers everyone in this industry knows about. It is not a synonym for fraud. Our fraud figure is separately audited by a third party and is published annually. > > Second, the recommendation not to restate the methodology externally is a commercial instruction about a classifier we built and do not wish to describe to competitors. It is not an instruction to conceal a result. > > Third, and we say this without much hope: the measurement problem described in that document is an industry problem, it is well known inside the industry, and every exchange operating at scale has a version of that table in a drawer. We would welcome a standard. We have said so publicly for four years. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.