Artificial intelligence offers a whole range of benefits for market researchers, such as improving your day-to-day tasks like qualitative summary generation. But with all the benefits that AI offers today’s market research professionals, there are also new challenges on the horizon—especially for online panels. Now that AI is publicly available, AI bot activity is spiking across online market research panels—potentially skewing results and data, and ultimately leading brands in the wrong direction.

The problem isn’t new, unfortunately, and it’s an industry-wide issue. From panel providers to consumer research platforms, bots and click farms impact data quality.

What actually are bot farms and click farms? They are organized operations that employ real humans who then create automated bots to respond to surveys for monetary incentives. These operations are often found in markets where the value of a dollar is much greater than in the USA, like Taiwan and Venezuela.

Now with the onset of AI, bot farms are becoming incredibly sophisticated, prompting a new, ever-evolving challenge for the market research industry. And as bots get smarter and harder to detect, the problem gets even more difficult to eradicate.

There’s nothing Suzy hates more than bad-quality data. So to stay at the forefront of the challenge, we’ve been hard at work on developing a solution to the AI bot problem.

When market research is done by tech companies, they usually clean the data before the survey is completed. When this work is done by traditional research agencies, they usually clean the data after survey completion – and therefore after the data has gone into your results.

Suzy does both, cleaning at the panel and survey levels with our latest patent-pending innovation called BIOTIC. This bot detection technology adds a layer of protection by removing bad actors, bots, and AI-generated responses before they can get in and impact survey data.

Plus, if need be, we also clean the data after it goes into your results.

Thanks to BIOTIC, Suzy ensures you get data that you can trust. By getting ahead of the game, we can set a new gold standard for the industry to ensure quality, actionable data for enterprise brands that want to focus on their consumers. Here’s what we’re doing and why:

First it comes down to audience

At Suzy, we’ve always believed that research quality starts with a high-quality audience. Earlier this year, Suzy expanded its audience supply, by adding access to over 70+ panels, helping increase reach and delivering even greater value to clients who rely on the platform for fast, high-quality insights.

This expansion enhances reach without compromising on the speed or quality Suzy is known for. Whether you're tapping into our proprietary panel or leveraging expanded reach through our trusted partner, Suzy ensures industry-leading quality and agility remain at the heart of every project.

Every panelist is anonymous and verified through multi-layer checks such as SMS confirmation, device fingerprinting, and financial system verification. New members also undergo incubation periods to ensure long-term quality. And once in the field, our patent-pending technology, BIOTIC, actively detects bots, duplication, and low-quality behavior using pattern detection, QA reviews, and bot-trap questions.

In short, we’ve scaled our audience, but not at the expense of quality. With expanded reach through our trusted partner, Suzy always ensures industry-leading quality and agility remain at the heart of every project.

We build in multiple layers of protection

Our thorough, end-to-end security system includes numerous quality checks that help us ensure the panel is authentically human while weeding out any bots.

To ensure the quality of our panels, we and our panel partners have detailed security processes during the onboarding of new respondents These include:

• IP Blocking - prevents users with bad IPs from being able to join.
• Email Domain Blocking - blocks users with fraudulent or disposable email domains.
• VPN & Device Fingerprinting - Flags anonymized and suspicious access methods.
• Double Verification (SMS) - ensures every user is a single user.
• Incubation periods for new members: Ensures behavioral consistency before surveys are fielded.
• Profile, device, and financial verification: Combines multiple signals to confirm identity and reduce fraud.
• Manual QA and onboarding questions: Identifies inattentiveness and reinforces respondent education on the value of meaningful feedback

In order to fully address the bot problem, we’ve also implemented survey-level quality screening and checks, utilizing BIOTIC, our patent-pending bot detection technology. These steps include:

• Email Domain, IP and VPN Monitoring - monitors changes in email and IP addresses for known fraudulent email domains and potential VPN usage.
• Speeding and Straightlining - monitors the pace and answers selected by respondents across live surveys to identify where behaviors deviate from the norm.
• Duplicate and Similarity Review - reviews open-ended answers in real-time to look for duplicate or similar responses that seem suspicious.
• Manual QA Review - while BIOTIC is AI-driven, we have humans in the loop to QA and help accelerate the learning process.
• Bot-trapping Questions - including certain types of questions helps to expose bots.

An inside look at how BIOTIC works

As large-language models and AI solutions become more sophisticated (ex: ChatGPT o4), bots also grow more sophisticated, which means BIOTIC must be ever-evolving to stay ahead of the problem. So with BIOTIC, we monitor and identify patterns in the behavior of the bots, and that intelligence is folded back into BIOTIC. This allows our team to learn from these bad actors as they evolve and helps us build even stronger defenses against them in the future.

Our dedicated BIOTIC team is constantly improving BIOTIC to ensure that we are providing reliable and quality insights. In order to facilitate this, our team deploys our own army of bots against BIOTIC to continually test and refine how we detect them, and more importantly, how we protect your data from them.

We built BIOTIC to be smart, and several elements allow us to constantly enhance the performance of the technology and remove more and more bad actors. The elements of BIOTIC include:

1. Actions

A series of challenge questions that are easy for humans—but difficult for bots. These include:

• Penrose: Tests ability to detect visual inconsistencies.
• Memory Moat: Requires storing and retrieving information in different formats.
• Fetch Guard & Reification: Assess logical reasoning and visual misdirection—two areas where humans excel and bots fail.

2. Attributes

Biotic collects and evaluates metadata like IP address, device type, geolocation, email verification, and more. Red flags like emulator use or multiple accounts from the same device are caught instantly.

3. Honeypot Mode

When BIOTIC suspects a bot, it doesn't tip them off. Instead, flagged users are rerouted into a simulated survey experience where their behavior is studied further—without impacting real data. This stealth approach ensures bad actors don’t learn how to beat the system.

4. The Air Gap

This is the final defense. Every response is reviewed independently before it ever reaches your dashboard. If it fails due to low relevance, offensive language, or signs of automation, it’s blocked. Simple as that.

The Suzy Difference: Data quality you can trust

Suzy stands at the forefront of market research by delivering unparalleled data integrity and reliability through its proprietary screening process and advanced technologies.

In the end, the integration of BIOTIC technology ensures the authenticity of data by detecting and filtering out bots and spammers, ensuring that insights are genuinely human and actionable.

With Suzy, you gain a significant edge in making data-driven decisions with confidence and clarity. Trust in Suzy to set the standard for research integrity and empower your strategic initiatives with high-quality, reliable data.

To learn more about what we’re doing to fight spammers and bots, book a demo with our team today to see our platform in action.

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