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AI Max Is Sending Retailers 72% More Invalid Traffic, Weeks Before Black Friday

From Lunio’s Retail Invalid Traffic Impact Report, published August 2026.

Lunio analysed 414 million retail ad clicks between October 2025 and June 2026. Invalid traffic on AI Max search campaigns more than doubled, from 2.46% to 5.28%, while standard search campaigns in the same accounts improved.

Get The Full Retail Breakdown (Before Peak Trading)

What You’ll Get, Inside:

Why AI Max search campaigns carried 72% more invalid traffic than standard search by Q2 2026.
How AI Max accounted for 68% of all invalid clicks detected across retail Google Search accounts.
Google Shopping‘s climb to 7.51% invalid traffic, roughly 1 in 13 clicks.
What a 5% invalid rate costs a $10M retail advertiser: around $500K in directly wasted spend.
Channel-by-channel benchmarks across Google, Meta and TikTok, so you can pressure-test your own accounts before Black Friday.