Wednesday, October 7, 2026
They Buried
We Dug It Up
⌕ Search
PX-1612
COMMERCIAL IN CONFIDENCE
INVENTED FOR A FICTIONAL NEWSPAPER

Traffic-composition audit, a mid-sized advertising exchange

Origin
An advertising technology firm, via a former employee
Dated
Q4 2025
Extent
18 pages
Status
accepted
Redactions
Firm name and two staff names removed by this newspaper, not by the source, for reasons set out in the story.

Chain of custody

Supplied by a former employee of the firm, who is named in our story with their consent and who supplied their employment contract so we could satisfy ourselves about what they were and were not permitted to disclose. We put the audit to the firm before publication and its reply is printed in full.

Held by: They Buried, document room

Excerpt

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%

RECOMMENDATION: do not restate methodology externally.

Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.

Editor's note

We redacted this document ourselves. We think we were right to and we explain why in the story, so that readers can disagree with us.

Cited in