A broad search term picks up the wrong intent, an automated campaign keeps spending, or a dashboard celebrates clicks while sales sees few qualified prospects.
Now AI is making more of those decisions inside ad platforms, creating another way for spend to land somewhere no one on the team deliberately chose.
More than 70% of global ad spend is expected to flow through self-serve advertising platforms where AI influences buying decisions by 2028, according to Gartner.
In the U.S., that figure is expected to exceed 80%.
That gives an old problem a newer edge: more advertising decisions are being made automatically, while the checks on where the money goes still need human attention.
Disruptive Advertising’s audit data shows where that money has already been leaking.
After reviewing more than 2,000 accounts and more than $1 billion in managed ad spend, the agency found recurring problems with broad-match targeting, unmonitored automation, and tracking that measures clicks instead of customers.
“Before a dollar is committed, everyone in the room needs to agree on what winning looks like,” says Disruptive Advertising Founder and CEO Jacob Baadsgaard.
Where Programmatic Spend Is Already Being Lost
Working-media efficiency reached a record 45.1% in Q2 2026, up from 43.3% in Q1, according to the Association of National Advertisers’ Q2 2026 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark.
The improvement shows that programmatic efficiency is moving in the right direction, but more than half of programmatic spend still did not qualify as a “TrueAdSpend” impression under the benchmark’s quality criteria.
Broad targeting can make the problem harder to spot.
Broad-match campaigns can pick up searches that appear related to the intended audience while carrying different commercial intent.
“When automated systems expand matching or adjust bids without close review, spend can move further from the original target,” Baadsgaard says.
Disruptive’s audit findings point to that pattern as one recurring place where ad budgets leak.
The agency also identifies unmonitored automation as a separate problem, with campaign settings and platform decisions continuing to run without enough human review.
AI-generated inventory creates another source of wasted spend.
Between 1.3% and 2.4% of open-web programmatic ad spend goes to what the industry defines as “AI slop,” according to a July 2026 analysis from the Trustworthy Accountability Group, the ANA and Fiducia.
The analysis describes AI slop as low-value, mass-produced AI-generated content created mainly to generate ad revenue.
It found that this inventory can score well on conventional quality metrics, making it difficult for standard checks to exclude.
“That creates a problem where a platform can report acceptable delivery metrics while the surrounding content offers little business value,” Baadsgaard says.
“A placement can generate an impression while doing little to reach a serious buyer.”
Are PPC Clicks Still a Reliable Performance Metric?
60% of U.S. adults say they have read AI summaries at the top of search engine results, according to Pew Research Center’s June 2026 study.
The finding comes from Pew Research Center’s survey of U.S. adults conducted in February 2026.
That gives marketing teams another reason to question what a click tells them.
A prospect can encounter a brand through an AI-generated answer, research the company elsewhere, return through another channel, and eventually become a customer without creating the tidy trail of clicks that many dashboards were designed to track.
Disruptive’s audit data identifies tracking that counts clicks instead of customers as another recurring leak.
“The issue is the distance between platform activity and business outcomes. A campaign can report a healthy click count while sales sees weak lead quality,” Baadsgaard says.
The audit questions should be:
- Where did the money go?
- Who received the ads?
- What happened after the interaction?
Those questions become harder to answer when platforms make more decisions automatically.
- Search terms can expand.
- Bids can change.
- Placements can vary.
- Conversion systems can assign value to actions that have little connection to revenue.
Gartner says AI will become more deeply embedded in decisions involving ad delivery, audience selection and pricing, and recommends independent measurement so advertisers can compare platform-reported performance with business results.
That puts more pressure on account reviews.
Search terms, automation rules, placements and conversion tracking need regular checks against the customers a campaign is meant to attract.
The familiar sources of waste are still there. AI gives advertising platforms more room to make decisions without a marketer reviewing every one.
“The real issue is not whether a platform can generate more clicks or conversions. It is whether those actions are producing the kind of leads a business can actually sell to,” Baadsgaard says.
“When the goal is growth, the account needs to be judged by what happens after the click, not just by what the platform reports happened inside the campaign.”
That makes conversion tracking more important than a large click count.
How to Audit Automated Ad Targeting
A click shows an interaction with an ad. It does not show that the person was a viable prospect, reached the right account, entered a sales cycle, or became a customer.
The same applies to automated targeting. A platform may widen campaign reach in search of more conversions, while the resulting traffic still needs to match the audience the business wants.
Regular audits can expose those patterns. Search-query reviews show where broad match is sending ads.
Account checks show which automated settings are still running.
Placement reviews identify where ads are appearing, while conversion reviews show which actions are being counted and whether those actions connect to qualified leads and customer acquisition.
“The goal of an audit is to find the gap between what the platform says is working and what is actually producing qualified business,” Baadsgaard says.
“That means reviewing the search terms, targeting, placements and conversion actions, then cutting spend that does not contribute to the outcomes the business is paying for.”
As more of those decisions move into automated systems, regular account audits can help keep ad spend tied to the customers it is meant to reach.
Disruptive Advertising offers a free audit to help advertisers identify where ad spend is being wasted and where campaign performance can be strengthened. where ad spend is being wasted and where campaign performance can be strengthened.
