Bot Clicks

Have you ever wondered if the clicks on your emails are from your customers or from various security and summarizing tools? If you haven’t been thinking about it, then it is time to start because the bots are coming.

We did an analysis of over 100 million clicks from 2021 until now and we found a few curious findings about clicks.

What is a bot click?

A bot click is any click that isn’t done explicitly by the PERSON reading the email. As a straight forward way to identify a real click from a bot click, we took a look at how many clicks per second we were seeing on a given email. Some emails were seeing over 500 clicks per second, clearly something done by an automated tool. On a first pass, let’s look at what percent of the total clicks we received came in with only 1 click in the same second.

It looks like this accounted for around 75% to 80% of all clicks from 2021 until 2024. (A lower percent than you would think.) This percent started falling off until in March 2025 we start to see potential bot click to outnumber single clicks for the first time. This percent keeps dropping and in 2026 we are seeing that only 1 in 3 clicks are likely from a true customer.

Scared yet?

Typically each and every click is not as important as you would think. For most purposes we check not every single click, but if an email was clicked on at all. So with bot clicks, typically every single link in the email is getting clicked. So what is going on with distinct clicks?

If we only consider clicks that come in at the 1 click per second rate, we see that we have been in the 97% to 99% range for a while. Only in last few months do we see this dropping to 93%. If we broaden our view a little bit and allow 2 clicks per second to be considered true clicks, then we are still at a healthy 99%. This would mean that our click rates are only slightly different with bot clicks being considered.

What should I do?

If you are a Klaviyo user, you have an easy first step. When building segments, only looks at Bot Click is false clicks. There is no need to bring in bad data even if the counts are still small.

For the rest of us, ask your providers what steps they are taking to pull bot clicks out of the data. This problem is coming and it is only a matter of time before we start losing meaningful signal in all of our analysis.

All of us should keep our eyes open to the trends and we can keep ahead of the matter in our targeting and measurement.