"Seeing is believing" used to be the gold standard for brand protection. If you had a screenshot of a violation, you had a case.

But we have entered a new, messier era. In the age of Generative AI, seeing isn't enough anymore verification is everything. At PaidClick, we are calling it: the old way of reporting brand bidding and affiliate fraud is dead. Simple JPEGs and "historic data" don't cut it when the evidence can be hallucinated in seconds.

The industry needs a new standard of truth. That standard is WARC. Here’s why it’s the only proof that actually matters in 2026.

The AI Problem: If a customer can fake a pizza, a vendor can fake a violation.

You have probably seen the recent surge in "refund fraud" on apps like Swiggy or Zomato. Someone wants a free lunch, so they use AI to generate a hyper-realistic photo of a "burnt pizza" or a "spilled curry." Support sees the photo, assumes it’s real, and hits refund.

It’s fast, cheap, and it works.

Now, ask yourself an uncomfortable question: If a random user can fake an image to save $10, what’s stopping a Brand Monitoring vendor from using AI to "generate" violations just to justify their monthly retainer?

If your current vendor is only sending you standard JPEGs or PNGs, you’re flying blind. Those are just pixels they can be edited, tweaked, or entirely fabricated.

This is where WARC changes the game. A WARC (Web ARChive) file isn't just a picture; it’s a forensic snapshot. It captures the underlying code, the network requests, and the verified server timestamps. Faking a WARC file is nearly impossible because you’d have to forge the entire server-side interaction, not just the visual surface.

With PaidClick, we don’t just show you a picture; we give you the digital DNA of the event.

Stop Chasing Ghosts: Real-Time Reality vs. Cached Junk

The second major flaw in the market is the reliance on "historic data."

Most vendors scrape the web and sit on massive, dusty databases of old coupons and keywords. When they flag a violation, they’re often showing you what used to be there. You confront an affiliate for using a banned code, they show you their site is clean, and suddenly you’re stuck in a "he said, she said" loop.

PaidClick kills that ambiguity. We don't deal with data ghosts.

  • If a coupon isn’t live at this exact second, we don’t flag it.
  • If brand bidding stopped 10 minutes ago, we don't report it as active.

By using WARC technology, we capture the violation in the moment. When you confront a partner, you aren’t guessing based on a week-old crawl. You’re handing them undeniable, millisecond-accurate proof of what they were doing right then.

The New Standard

The rise of AI has eroded trust across digital media. As a brand manager, you can’t base your compliance strategy on "trust me" evidence or static images that any teenager with a prompt could fake.

You need proof that actually holds weight. You need live data, not history lessons. You need PaidClick.