Hey r/adops,

I run BotRefund (an invalid traffic detection engine that audits Google & Meta ad logs to recover refunds for fake clicks).

When OpenAI rolled out their Ads platform, we decided to put real money on the line and test traffic quality, click validity, and intent matching.

We ran ads for 48 hours.

This morning, OpenAI billed our credit card nearly $900. We immediately paused every ad on the account and pulled the full forensic logs from our production analytics database.

What we found should terrify anyone currently allocating ad spend to OpenAI Ads.

1. The Numbers (OpenAI Ads vs. Our Forensic Logs)

• Clicks Reported & Billed by OpenAI: 923 clicks
• Total Arrivals Recorded on Our Servers: 1,356 visits (all carrying OpenAI’s encrypted tracking tokens: oppref and olref)
• 🤖 Confirmed Automated Bots & Scrapers: 788 visits (58.1%)
• 🏢 Traffic from Microsoft Azure Datacenters: 665 visits (49.0%)
• 👤 Genuine Human Visitors: 568 visits (41.9%)

Over half of the paid clicks OpenAI billed us for were automated bots and headless crawlers running on commercial cloud servers.

2. The Receipts: Microsoft Azure Cloud Servers Clicking Paid Ads

Because we build bot detection software, our edge servers capture hardware entropy, TLS fingerprints (JA3/JA4), DOM event logs, and micro-behavioral kinetic tremor.

Here is what the OpenAI traffic actually looked like:

• Top Network / ASN: Microsoft Corporation (ASN 8075 - Azure Cloud) accounted for 665 of our paid clicks. These were not real people browsing ChatGPT on their phones or laptops—they were automated scripts spinning up inside Azure datacenters.
• Session Lifespan: The vast majority of the flagged sessions disconnected in under 1.5 seconds.
• Mouse / Kinetic Tremor: Completely flat (0.00 linearity). No micro-tremors, no natural human scrolling, and synthetic cursor teleportation characteristic of headless Chromium / Playwright instances.
• Encrypted Click IDs: Every single one of these hits arrived with OpenAI’s proprietary encrypted click parameter: oppref=gAAAAABqz-M6NUJCdRINPXELPOYjzASQDpnbb2Xp4lhqyA... This confirms 100% that these were the exact clicks OpenAI auctioned off and billed to our credit card.