| Sumario: | This article examines the everyday work of pay-per-click (PPC) specialists in the context of the growing automation and algorithmization of digital advertising. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation and an analysis of over one thousand posts from professional online forums, it explores how practitioners negotiate responsibility and expertise under conditions of technological opacity. The study reveals that PPC work is undergoing a transformation from a technical to an interpretive profession. Specialists increasingly act as translators of algorithmic decisions to clients and managers, maintaining the appearance of control over systems whose internal logic remains hidden. Their expertise takes the form of embodied and collective knowledge, grounded in intuition, emotion and peer exchange in online environments. The article introduces the notion of algorithmic responsibility as an epistemic practice, a daily effort to make sense of automated decisions under structural ignorance. PPC work is read here as a theoretically generative site for examining the data economy, a space where knowledge, power and technology intertwine into new forms of relational expertise. This paper contributes to critical algorithm studies by demonstrating that humans do not disappear from automated processes but rather become their indispensable interpreters – the guarantors of meaning in a society dominated by data.
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