Attention advertisers: You have the power to stop the AI slop surge
Opinion
Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites are thriving and causing the “sloppification” of the internet. It’s time they were stopped, and adland has the power to turn off the tap, says Ogury’s Benjamin Lanfry.
From clogging social media feeds with Shrimp Jesus to stoking the fake news fire, AI slop ranges from a bizarre distraction to a genuine challenge for online discourse.
On the open web, made-for-advertising (MFA) sites deploy generative AI to copy legitimate publishers’ content and dupe advertisers out of their spend through these low-quality replicas. Ultimately, advertisers play a crucial role in shaping the incentives that allow MFA sites to thrive.
Though AI has trimmed MFA sites’ operating costs to little more than a domain name and a ChatGPT subscription, they are still commercial enterprises. Cut off their ad revenue, and they wither away.
By forging direct partnerships with publishers, choosing supply lines that prune low-quality media, and ditching vanity metrics in favour of tangible outcomes, advertisers can turn the tide on the “sloppification” of the internet.
Where AI slop supercharges the MFA economy
Most of us enjoy AI-powered conveniences, and unfortunately, so do content farms.
Cheap labour has been replaced by generative AI, which churns out content that looks like journalism but lacks its substance. Where human-written MFA copy was often clumsy or broken, AI can now produce polished prose that fools readers, search engines, and programmatic pipelines alike.
This makes it increasingly difficult to gauge how much online content is now produced without editorial oversight, though a study by SEO firm Graphite reported that AI-generated material surpassed 50% earlier this year, and continues to rise.
While this can’t all be attributed to pure-play MFA sites, many have leveraged the technology to double their output and siphon advertising spend from unsuspecting brands.
Unlike bona fide media companies, MFA sites don’t invest in editorial teams or produce any original reporting; they are purely extractive.
Their content is shallow, recycled, and misleading, with the usual clickbait headlines now often accompanied by garish AI-generated imagery. And the degradation of baseline content quality is not a mere matter of taste and aesthetics. Many AI models are fed on data scraped from the open web; if their diet is polluted with low-quality generated text, they may regurgitate and amplify the very slop they helped create.
How MFA sites exploit the advertising ecosystem
The MFA business model is built on arbitrage. These sites buy low-cost traffic, often exploiting social platforms or “chumbox” content recommendation engines, and funnel visitors through to ad-packed web pages.
They then serve ads through processes meticulously engineered to inflate key metrics without delivering any actual value. One common trick is rapidly auto-refreshing ad slots, artificially sending impression counts sky-high even though the user barely engages.
This exploits weaknesses in programmatic systems. Many demand-side platforms (DSPs) prioritise low CPMs and high viewability, making MFA’s inflated numbers appear attractive.
The most sophisticated MFA networks have even been found to cloak their true nature to trick auditing processes, serving a user an ad-cluttered page if they arrive via a paid channel, while swapping in a clean page if they visit directly.
In a market strained by fragmented industry standards, MFAs thrive in the gaps. Many programmatic buyers don’t have visibility into the entire ad supply chain, especially if they’re juggling multiple DSPs at a time, allowing MFA domains to slip through undetected.
As a result, brands funnel significant ad spend into media that look good on paper but deliver scarce engagement, keeping the incentives rolling for continued exploitation.
Advertisers can turn the tide and stop the slop
As the wellspring from which all advertising spend flows, brands and agencies have the power to turn off the tap for MFAs.
By redirecting their budgets away from open programmatic and towards partnerships with trusted publishers, via private marketplaces or direct deals, they can filter out MFA noise and align with genuine quality.
When open programmatic is necessary, log-level data from DSPs and verification partners can reveal which supply paths add value and which erode it.
Rethinking traditional performance metrics can also help media buyers focus on true impact. Instead of relying on vanity metrics like viewability, they can demand deeper KPIs, such as attention, conversion uplift, or long-term brand impact.
They can also choose intermediaries that actively pursue supply-path optimisation, where shorter, more transparent chains leave little hiding room for bad actors; a demand the industry is meeting with the proliferation of end-to-end platforms.
Perhaps most important is collective action. If advertisers join forces with premium publishers to block MFA inventory, the economic model that powers low-quality, slop sites collapses.
This shift is already underway and is one of the driving forces behind curation and the transition from blocklists to allowlists (inclusion lists), which enable proactive filtering that rewards quality content rather than playing an eternal game of whack-a-mole with MFAs.
If ad-funded AI slop continues unchecked, advertisers will further waste their budgets, and we will lose the internet as we know it.
Redirecting funding to high-quality publishers can protect advertisers’ bottom lines and strengthen the integrity of the most open and accessible information ecosystem ever.
Benjamin Lanfry is the chief client & partnerships officer at Ogury.