Chapter 33: Bad Traffic for Both
The suspicious traffic hated both books equally and stayed for precisely four seconds.
On Wednesday morning, PageTurn convened a traffic-quality review with both project summaries on screen. The underlying session table remained with risk staff.
The polluted source had reached Saltmere and Larkspur within the same three-minute window.
Its sessions shared identical timing, browser pattern and empty reading paths. None progressed far enough to load a second paragraph.
That resemblance proved automation.
It did not prove either author had bought it.
Public replies had already skipped that distinction. Screenshots of the yellow warning circulated with invented captions naming both sides.
Larkspur fans accused me of manufacturing return visits.
People posting under my launch announcement accused Oliver of buying clicks.
I recognised none of the accounts as evidence. Familiar anger did not make an anonymous accusation a platform record.
PageTurn suspended every visit from the source while the risk analyst traced its route.
The live totals dropped on both columns.
Real sessions arriving through the same broad referral network were held aside too. Their removal made our clean graphs look worse during the review.
“That costs us clean growth,” Oliver said on the common call.
“Temporarily,” the analyst replied. “The alternative is counting contamination.” The answer applied to my column as firmly as his.
Pippa asked whether either team had purchased from the referrer.
The analyst displayed both campaign declarations: NO MATCHING BUY.
I could have repeated the cheating rumour while the investigation remained open. Several supporters had already prepared the word FRAUD for me.
It would have travelled faster than any later correction.
I saved the risk notice and said nothing publicly. Silence cost me the sharpest retaliatory headline of the week.
At 10:26, the analyst revealed the source category.
An unrelated coupon site had offered reward points for visiting newly listed entertainment pages. Its programme rewarded a page load, not reading.
Its crawler had followed PageTurn's public launch index and generated four-second checks.
The site had no contract with either project. PageTurn found it through the public index rather than either campaign account.
Neither author team appeared in its purchase or referral fields.
PageTurn classified the event THIRD-PARTY AUTOMATED POLLUTION.
The classification closed the cheating allegation inside the audit. It did not force fans to retract what they had posted.
It did not restore the inflated numbers.
The analyst removed the source and reran both baselines under one filter.
Sessions without a readable path disappeared.
Held human visits returned only after the same duration and interaction tests. No author name entered the filter.
The two growth charts shrank.
PageTurn stamped 7–8 October NOT FOR PROMOTIONAL USE on both. The stamp covered screenshots, press notes and internal pitch decks.
I lost the most flattering slope Saltmere had shown.
Oliver and Pippa lost theirs.
Fairness left us with fewer numbers and a cleaner argument. Neither project received replacement exposure for the discarded traffic.
The recalculation finished at 11:04.
Larkspur still led opening clicks.
No apology from the filter changed the appeal of an audio-first hook.
Saltmere's second-episode return line survived the cleaning.
The analyst compared it with the opposing aggregate using the predeclared baseline. She did not reveal Larkspur's individual readers or scene path.
SALTMERE RETURN VISIT ADVANTAGE — 3.4 PERCENTAGE POINTS.
I saw the difference, not their reader identities or internal path.
The result did not make my weaker clicks irrelevant. It showed return behaviour surviving after the easiest suspicion had been removed.
It made the two projects strong in different places.
PageTurn archived the risk log, source report and recalculated dataset.
The common notice forbade either team from describing the event as opponent misconduct.
I signed receipt of the corrected baseline.
The next question was no longer who had cheated.
It was why more of my smaller audience came back to Carys.