If you’ve ever run online surveys, you’ve probably encountered them. Suspiciously fast completion times. Nonsensical open-ended responses. Participants who somehow qualify for every screener question despite contradictory demographics.
These aren’t just annoying; they waste your research budget and contaminate your data.
Spammers, bots, and AI are, unfortunately, inevitable on any online recruitment platform. As long as there’s money to be earned from completing surveys, there will be people trying to game the system.
Some use automated bots to complete surveys at scale. Others manually rush through studies without reading questions. Some use VPNs to pretend they’re from different countries. And increasingly, they’re using AI tools to generate believable responses that slip past traditional fraud detection.
The question isn’t whether these bad actors exist; it’s how platforms protect you from them.
How Positly Protects Your Research
Our technology works behind the scenes to identify and block spammers, bots, and AI before they reach your study. Here’s what we do:
We deploy a wide variety of anti-spam technologies: Our systems are designed to catch and block spam submissions before they reach your data or your invoice, using many different approaches simultaneously.
We help keep your data clean: Contaminated data leads to wrong conclusions. By filtering out spam at the platform level, we significantly reduce the risk of fraudulent responses affecting your results.
We reduce your fraud detection workload: While no platform can guarantee 100% spam-free data, our systems handle the heavy lifting so you spend less time worrying about suspicious responses.
What We’re Watching For
Our proprietary QualityGuard© system automatically deploys 11 different methods to detect and block bots, spammers, AI, and inauthentic participants. Here’s what we monitor:
Bot and AI detection: Our sophisticated algorithms can identify many automated and AI-generated inputs.
Digital fingerprinting: We use metadata about each participant to help make sure each one is unique and to prevent duplicate responses.
Engagement monitoring: Our systems help detect unengaged participants who rush through surveys without reading questions, helping ensure that the respondents in your study thoughtfully answer each question.
Language ability checks: Our automated detection of English language ability ensures participants understand your tasks when studies are in English.
Location verification: We use location data to help verify that participant locations match your selected countries for more accurate geographic targeting.
Pattern analysis: We monitor our internal data to detect new patterns and further improve our spam prevention systems.
Participant history: Our proprietary quality metrics and historical data help us identify and filter out participants with poor track records.
The Arms Race Against Bad Agents
Bad agents constantly evolve their tactics. What worked to detect fraud three years ago might not work today. It’s challenging for individual researchers to stay on top of the shifting landscape of spammer tactics. That’s why we upgrade our detection systems in order to adapt.
What This Means for You
You shouldn’t have to become an expert in fraud detection to run quality research. While no platform can eliminate spam entirely, you shouldn’t be left to deal with it alone.
With Positly’s spam protection working in the background, you can launch your study knowing that we’re actively filtering out fraudulent activity. The responses you receive will have already passed through multiple layers of fraud detection, giving you cleaner data and reducing wasted budget on spam submissions.
Not All Platforms Protect You Equally
Some platforms take a hands-off approach, leaving researchers to manually identify and exclude fraudulent responses after paying for them. Others use basic detection that spammers have learned to bypass.
At Positly, spam protection isn’t an add-on feature, it’s built into the core of how our platform works, with our QualityGuard© system. We invest in detection technology because protecting your research quality and budget is fundamental to what we do.
Ready to run your next study with built-in spam/AI protection?
Questions About Data Quality?
Want to know more about how our spam detection works or have other questions, our team is here to help.
