Sh*t That Actually Works

AI Didn’t Fix Your Data. It Made It Worse.

Written by Mike Pelland | Apr 6, 2026 5:21:05 PM

VM Can’t Fix Your Data

It doesn’t matter how good the model is.

It doesn’t matter how many agents you chain together.
It doesn’t matter how smart the prompts are.

If the input is garbage, the output is just…

confident garbage.

AI Doesn’t Fix Bad Data

It weaponizes it.

Faster analysis.
Faster decisions.
Faster optimization.

All on top of the same broken inputs.

You didn’t solve the problem.

You accelerated it.

Your Metrics Are Probably Fake

You think you know what’s happening.

You don’t.

Your open rates?
Inflated by email security bots pre-clicking every link.

Your CTR?
Polluted by scanners, headless browsers, and synthetic traffic.

Your “engaged users”?
A mix of real people and systems pretending to be them.

GA4 Is Probably Lying to You

Not maliciously.

Just structurally.

Most GA4 setups are:

  • auto-tagged
  • loosely configured
  • never validated
  • and constantly polluted

Vibe-coded tracking.

Looks clean.
Feels right.
Completely detached from reality.

You’re Not Measuring Behavior

You’re measuring noise.

A “session” might be:

  • a real buyer
  • a spam filter
  • a corporate firewall
  • a scripted crawl

Same data.
Same funnel.

Completely different reality.

Attribution Isn’t Hard — It’s Broken

Multi-touch attribution?

Garbage.

Customer journey reporting?

Garbage.

All you’ve done is build a more detailed story…

on top of data you can’t trust.

This Isn’t a Tracking Problem

It’s a credibility problem

You don’t know:

  • who clicked
  • who visited
  • who’s real
  • what actually happened

You just have systems telling you something happened.

AI Makes This More Dangerous

VM — or any AI system — will happily:

  • analyze it
  • summarize it
  • optimize against it

Faster than ever.

It doesn’t fix bad data.

It makes you trust bad data.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

Before:

Did this convert?

You need to ask:

Was this even real?

Server-Side Isn’t the Solution

Installing sGTM doesn’t solve this.

It just moves the same bad signal to a different place.

What You Actually Need

A deterministic decision layer

Something that evaluates every interaction and decides:

  • Is this human?
  • Is this behavior realistic?
  • Is this environment trustworthy?
  • Is there actual intent here?

If the answer is no:

It doesn’t count.

Not in reporting.
Not in attribution.
Not in decision-making.

This Doesn’t Stay Fixed

This layer isn’t static.

It evolves.

Constantly.

Because:

  • bots get better
  • platforms change
  • privacy shifts
  • behaviors drift

If you think you “set up tracking” and you’re done…

you’re already wrong again.

What Happens Without This

You get:

  • inflated performance
  • false positives
  • fake engagement
  • decisions based on noise

And then you wonder why:

revenue doesn’t match the dashboard

Most Teams Aren’t Optimizing

They’re hallucinating.

The Only Real Fix

You don’t need better attribution.

You need to decide:

what’s real and what isn’t

Final Thought

AI didn’t fix your data.

It made your bad data faster.

If your numbers look good…

make sure they’re real first.