--- title: "We Paid a Vendor for Traffic That Refreshed Itself" url: "https://smallbizleader.com/insight/we-paid-a-vendor-for-traffic-that-refreshed-itself/" author: "Ankush Gupta" published: "2026-10-01" updated: "2026-10-01" --- # We Paid a Vendor for Traffic That Refreshed Itself The monthly report landed on a Monday and the chart was doing exactly what everyone wanted it to do. Visits up. Time on site up. The vendor had attached a screenshot from one of the public traffic-estimation tools, the kind that will hand you a tidy number for any domain, and that number agreed with the chart. Someone on our team opened the site in a clean browser and left the tab sitting there while he got on with something else. The page reloaded itself. It did it again. He went looking and found the script responsible, and alongside it a steady arrival of visits from a narrow set of sources that all behaved the same way and never once did anything a person does. The traffic was real in the sense that packets moved. Nobody had wanted to be there. ### **What went wrong before the vendor did anything** We had accepted a measurement that the vendor controlled. That is the whole of it. The scope said traffic, the report said traffic, and the evidence for the report came from the same party being paid against it. Nobody on our side had specified how the number would be produced, or how we would confirm it without asking. The vendor did not break our terms. Our terms had a hole in them, and the vendor filled it. This is the part owners skip when they tell the story afterwards. The retelling is always about the crooked supplier, because that version is more satisfying and costs nothing to admit. The version worth having is about the acceptance criteria, which were ours to write. ### **Deliverables you cannot reproduce are not deliverables** We buy a lot of outside work at FameNinja, and the publishing network we run buys more. The test we apply now has nothing to do with trust. Can we regenerate the claim ourselves, from a system the supplier does not touch? A published article we can open logged out, from a different country. A removal we can confirm by watching the URL return a 404 or drop out of search results. Those things either exist or they do not, and finding out takes minutes. Set that against a supplier's own dashboard, or a PDF with a logo on it. Those are claims about work. A claim about work is not work. Once you start sorting supplier output into the pile you can verify and the pile you cannot, the sorting is quick and it changes what you are willing to pay for. ### **What the fake looked like up close** In the cases we run, fabricated performance rarely looks outrageous. It looks smooth. Real traffic to a small business site is lumpy: it spikes when something gets shared, collapses on a public holiday, sags overnight, and drags a tail of strange referrers behind it that mean nothing at all. What we were shown had none of that texture. It climbed at a constant angle, week after week, like a line drawn against a ruler. We have noticed the same flatness elsewhere since. Review profiles that gain at a fixed rate. Engagement that never has a bad week. When a metric stops having weather, somebody is holding it up. ### **The cost of checking** Verification is not free, and I would rather say so than pretend the rule is painless. It narrows who you can buy from. Some genuinely good suppliers work in areas where clean proof is hard to produce, and a rigid rule will cost you a few of them. We have accepted weaker evidence on occasion and carried the risk knowingly, which is a different act from carrying it by accident. There is a relationship cost too. Asking a supplier to explain how a number was produced reads as suspicion, particularly early on. So we have moved the question before the signature, where it is a procurement conversation rather than an accusation. Honest suppliers answer it without effort, and the shape of the answer tells you most of what you need. The standard had to point inward as well, which was less comfortable. A pitch went out from our side once carrying figures nobody could source, and the journalist replied asking what they were based on. Fair question. We did not have a good answer, and now a number does not leave the building unless someone can say where it came from. ### **What to ask before the next invoice** Ask the supplier one thing before you sign: if I wanted to confirm this myself, without coming to you, where would I look? Then pay attention to how long the answer takes. You are not trying to catch anybody out. You are working out whether the thing you are buying has an existence outside the invoice. If it does, the answer arrives in a sentence and you can go and check it that afternoon. If it does not, you will be given a description of a process instead, and the process will sound thorough. We carried on with that vendor for a while afterwards, on a different scope, one where the output was a file we could open and read. It went fine. The person had not changed. What we were buying had. --- Ankush Gupta is a Fractional CMO at [FameNinja](https://fameninja.com), where he works on online reputation management, digital PR and marketing automation.