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"If this would work, what’s to keep Google or any other online business from paying someone to set up such a bot to ‘click’ on their advertisers."

I wouldn't put it past them. I recall back in the late 90's -early 2000's my company entered into an advertising agreement where we paid "per click" on the ad. It was with one of the big presences at the time, maybe Yahoo, but I can't specifically recall now. I set up a web page that you could ONLY get to by clicking the ad. There were no other links to it and the URL was long enough that nobody was going to inadvertently type it in. Were were told the first two months how many clicks we got and how much we owed. But when I checked with our ISP to verify it showed that the page had been accessed only about half that many times. We cancelled the one year contract immediately and threatened a class action lawsuit if they put up a fuss. They didn't and the one year contract was cancelled two months into the deal.