When I look up certain keywords on Ahrefs, I see absurd, nonsensical keywords showing search volumes and traffic as high as 340,000. I'm trying to understand how people artificially manipulate traffic using automated searches like this. What specific methods or techniques are used to achieve this?"
my thought exactly because most of the things i see are not really correct so i tend to just go for both manual search and analytics before doing anything
It is very easy to manipulate things like that, but it is useless if it only looks good on Ahrefs / SEMrush. In my industry, which is online casinos, this is because I manipulate Google suggestions so that search volume becomes huge with low keyword difficulty.