How can honeypots be used in B2B emails to identify and filter out bot clicks effectively without impacting deliverability?
Matthew Whittaker
Co-founder & CTO, Suped
Published 21 Jul 2025
Updated 17 Aug 2025
7 min read
Bot clicks have become a significant challenge for B2B email marketers. These automated interactions, often from security scanners or malicious scripts, inflate engagement metrics, making it difficult to gauge true campaign performance and hindering accurate analysis. If left unaddressed, they can skew your data, leading to misinformed strategic decisions and wasted resources.
One effective strategy to identify and filter out these non-human interactions is the implementation of honeypot links within your emails. A honeypot is essentially a decoy link designed to attract bots, allowing you to flag and separate their activity from genuine subscriber engagement. The goal is to isolate these clicks without negatively impacting your email deliverability or subscriber experience. It's about getting a clearer picture of your actual audience engagement.
Designing honeypot links for stealth
Crafting an effective honeypot link involves careful consideration of its structure and placement within your email's HTML. The primary objective is to make it undetectable by human eyes but easily clickable by automated bots. This typically means employing CSS to hide the link, often as a 1x1 pixel transparent GIF, or by making it an inconspicuous element that a human wouldn't naturally click, like a period or a comma.
When structuring the URL, simplicity is often key. Some suggest that URLs with slashes (e.g., example.com/track/1234/56789) may be less prone to information stripping compared to those with query parameters (e.g., example.com/track?u=1234&m=56789). It's advisable to test different structures to see what performs best for your specific sending infrastructure. Remember, the URL should point to a dedicated landing page or tracking pixel that is specifically set up to register bot activity and nothing else.
Placement within the email HTML is crucial. Many experts recommend placing the honeypot link early in the HTML code, often near the top, to catch bots that simply crawl through the code and click the first available link. However, some find success even placing it within or under the footer. The key is to ensure it's hidden from view for human recipients while still being accessible to bots, as outlined by an article on protecting email metrics.
Here's a basic example of how you might hide a link using CSS within your email's HTML. This method ensures the link is not visible to the human eye but remains clickable by automated systems. For more detailed guidance, consider consulting our guide on how to use invisible links.
Once your honeypot links are in place, the next critical step is to capture and effectively analyze the data generated by bot clicks. When a bot clicks the honeypot link, it should trigger a tracking mechanism that logs specific information about that interaction. This data is invaluable for understanding the nature of the bot activity affecting your campaigns.
The information you collect can include the email address (or domain) associated with the click, the precise click timestamp, the user-agent string of the clicking entity, and the IP address. This comprehensive data allows you to identify patterns and create rules for segmenting out bot interactions from your legitimate engagement metrics. For more on this, check out our insights on filtering out email bot clicks.
Many organizations implement an automated process to handle these clicks. This can involve redirecting known bot clicks to a clickbot jail, a temporary segment that excludes them from your primary reporting. By segmenting your sends into regular and suspected clickbot groups, you can ensure that your marketing and sales teams are evaluating performance based on genuine human engagement. While this won't stop bots from clicking in real-time, it allows for more accurate reporting, as highlighted by discussions on bot opens and clicks.
This granular data analysis helps you understand how anti-spam click bots affect email metrics and deliverability, allowing for more targeted prevention strategies. For example, if you see a high number of clicks originating from a specific IP range or user agent, you can add those to your filtering rules.
Data Point
Purpose
Email/Domain
Identifies which addresses are prone to bot activity.
Click timestamp
Reveals if clicks occur immediately after send, a common bot behavior.
User-agent string
Helps identify common bot identifiers (e.g., "bot" in string).
IP address
Pinpoints suspicious networks or data centers.
Deliverability considerations and testing
A common concern when considering honeypots is whether they will negatively impact email deliverability. The good news is that when implemented correctly, honeypots typically do not cause deliverability issues. Anti-spam technologies, including those used by major providers like Gmail, are designed to identify malicious hidden links (e.g., phishing attempts) or spam traps, not legitimate efforts to identify bot activity. A carefully constructed honeypot, even if invisible, is generally perceived as just another link in the email, not a spam indicator.
Bots, by their nature, are programmed to interact with email content comprehensively, often clicking every link they find regardless of its visibility. Our experience has shown that bots don't typically differentiate between visible and non-visible links based on CSS properties. Their primary function is to click through, making hidden honeypots highly effective. This approach is widely considered a legitimate and safe tactic within the email deliverability community.
However, like any email strategy, testing is vital. Before rolling out a honeypot across your entire B2B list, conduct small-scale A/B tests. Send emails with and without the honeypot to a small segment of your audience to observe the impact on your deliverability and overall engagement metrics. This proactive testing minimizes risk and helps you fine-tune your implementation for optimal results, ensuring your efforts to prevent bot clicks from hurting email reputation are successful. For a deeper understanding of honeypots, including how to avoid landing on one, Mailgun offers a valuable resource on what is a honeypot.
Best practices for honeypots
CSS visibility: Use display: none; or font-size: 1px; for invisibility.
Strategic placement: Place the link early in the HTML, or in a less noticeable area like the footer.
Automated processing: Implement systems to automatically log and filter bot clicks.
Thorough testing: A/B test honeypot implementation on small segments before full rollout.
Common pitfalls
Over-concern about deliverability: Properly implemented honeypots rarely impact deliverability.
Lack of analysis: Failing to capture and analyze data from bot clicks.
Expectation of real-time prevention: Honeypots are for identification and filtering, not stopping clicks in real-time.
The path to cleaner email data
Implementing honeypots in your B2B email campaigns is a robust method to accurately identify and filter out bot clicks. This strategy helps you reclaim the integrity of your email metrics, ensuring that your engagement data reflects genuine human interest.
By following best practices for design, placement, and data analysis, you can leverage honeypots effectively without compromising your email deliverability. This leads to clearer insights, more informed marketing decisions, and ultimately, a healthier email program.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Use transparent 1x1 pixel GIFs or inconspicuous elements like commas as honeypot links, hidden via CSS.
Place honeypot links strategically early in the HTML, or in the footer, to capture bot activity effectively.
Test different URL structures for honeypot links to ensure they are not stripped by email clients.
Implement automated processes to segment clicks on honeypot links into a 'clickbot jail' for accurate reporting.
Common pitfalls
Unnecessary concern that honeypots negatively impact deliverability; they are generally safe when implemented correctly.
Assuming bots can circumvent invisible links by checking CSS properties; most bots do not.
Failing to capture and analyze comprehensive data from honeypot clicks.
Expecting honeypots to stop bot clicks in real-time rather than providing data for filtering and analysis.
Expert tips
Bots are designed to click everything in an email, regardless of whether a link is visible or not.
The location of the honeypot link (top or bottom) can vary in effectiveness; testing is key.
Consider using an invisible form input as an alternative honeypot method for catching bots.
Conduct small-scale A/B tests to validate your honeypot implementation before scaling.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says they use 1x1 pixel transparent GIFs hidden by CSS at the top of their emails to identify clickbots, and this approach has had no adverse deliverability.
2023-08-02 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks notes that bots tend to click the first link in an email first, which aligns with their observations, and they prefer honeypots for quickly removing bot clicks.
Email/Domain
Gmail, are designed to identify malicious hidden links (e.g., phishing attempts) or spam traps, not legitimate efforts to identify bot activity. A carefully constructed honeypot, even if invisible, is generally perceived as just another link in the email, not a spam indicator.
