Share on LinkedInPros and Cons of Generative AI for Programmatic Advertisers
Generative AI offers a multitude of benefits to programmatic advertisers across creative development and personalization, campaign optimization, brand safety and fraud mitigation, and operational efficiency.
While powerful, generative AI also introduces a new challenge to programmatic advertisers: the proliferation of low quality and ad spammy slop sites.
The Scope of AI-Generated Content
The amount of AI-generated content is only growing. EMarketer forecasts that as much as 90% of web content may be AI-generated by 2026, and some AI-driven sites are producing up to 1,200 articles daily, aiming to maximize ad revenue through sheer volume.
According to Jounce Media’s The State Of The Open Internet 2025, DSP demand follows supply, even supply that marketers are actively attempting to avoid. DSPs treat supply as a commodity and have a bias toward buying recently published supply versus quality supply.
This creates an incentive for publishers to flood the market with the maximum volume of supply at the minimum possible cost — utilizing AI to produce the content at the below rates:
- 41% of available web supply was published this week.
- 26% of available web supply was published today.
- 6% is content that was published this hour.
AI-Generated Slop Sites are Ad Clutter
At IAS, we classify these low quality slop sites as “ad clutter.” To identify ad clutter sites, our machine learning model evaluates the following site characteristics:
- High ad-to-content ratio
- Large total number of ads (high ad density)
- Presence of auto-refresh ads
- High refresh rate
- Presence of autoplay video ads
- Templated design
- Plagiarized or AI-generated content
If ad clutter sites are also conducting ad arbitrage — buying cheap traffic and then aggressively monetizing the resulting page views — then our model will flag these sites as Made-For-Advertising (MFA).
Implications for Advertisers and Publishers
Advertisers are wasting ad spend on low quality slop sites that do not drive campaign performance. An IAS analysis from over 40 global agencies and brands found traffic served on quality sites have a 91% higher conversion rate than traffic served on ad clutter sites. Further analysis by IAS found that quality sites were more cost efficient than ad clutter sites, delivering lower cost-per-conversion by 25%.
There are also brand safety concerns for advertisers. Associating with spammy or misleading content can harm brand reputation and consumer trust. According to IAS’s State of Brand Safety report, 57% of consumers consider spammy sites inappropriate content, and another 70% say they trust brands less when advertising near inappropriate content.
For publishers, MFA and AI-generated slop sites are siphoning ad spend away from their quality sites. According to the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency study, it’s estimated that advertisers are wasting $10 billion in spend each year on MFA sites. This spend should be redirected to higher performing quality sites.
How IAS is Helping Advertisers and Publishers
Advertisers can avoid wasting their ad spend on AI-generated slop sites that do not perform and redirect this spend to quality publishers. IAS offers ad clutter and MFA pre-bid avoidance segments within all the leading DSPs. These segments are available to Quality Sync and Context Control Avoidance clients at no additional cost. Contact an IAS representative to learn more.
For an overview on how generative AI is impacting ad fraud, please read Fraud in Generative AI: A deep dive into how Gen AI affects marketers.
