AI bots are slipping into survey forms, and here's how to catch them

AI agents can now write fluent open-ended answers and pass simple attention checks, making fake responses harder to detect than the crude bots of the past. The article, written by a B2B market research practitioner, argues that client-side checks such as honeypot fields must be backed by server-side validation, since bots can post directly to an endpoint. It recommends examining response patterns across a whole submission, such as uniform answer length, generic specificity, and implausible job claims. Other suggested measures include niche knowledge questions and scrutiny of metadata like duplicate devices, disposable email domains, and bursts of submissions. The author cautions that no single signal is conclusive and that honest users can be wrongly flagged, so signals should be combined and every rejection logged for review.