The news: AI slop accounts for a relatively small share of ad spend, but it’s exposing the limits of traditional ad quality metrics, per an analysis by the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and Fiducia.

• This low-value AI-generated content makes up between 1.3% and 2.4% of measured open-web programmatic spend. However, it had higher viewability than clean inventory (77.2% versus 74.9%), and after measurability was factored in, it was classified as premium more than 70% of the time.
• AI slop’s invalid traffic (IVT) rate is just 0.05%, compared with 0.32% for clean inventory.
• 88% of AI slop is also identified as made-for-advertising (MFA) content, falling into common “content farm” categories like recipes, personal finance, and how-to topics.