Should I block or accept click tracking and bots, and what are the implications for email deliverability and unsubscribe links?
Matthew Whittaker
Co-founder & CTO, Suped
Published 10 Aug 2025
Updated 18 Aug 2025
11 min read
Email marketing relies heavily on understanding how subscribers interact with your messages. Click tracking is a fundamental part of this, providing valuable insights into engagement. However, the presence of bots, both benevolent and malicious, can significantly complicate this landscape. These automated programs interact with emails in various ways, from pre-scanning links for security threats to artificially inflating metrics. Understanding these interactions is critical for accurate data analysis and maintaining strong email deliverability.
The question of whether to block or accept bot activity is nuanced. While some bots exist to protect recipients, others can distort your campaign results or even negatively impact your sender reputation. It is essential to differentiate between these types of automated interactions and implement strategies that support healthy deliverability, especially concerning crucial elements like unsubscribe links.
The nature of bot clicks
When we talk about bot clicks, it is important to distinguish between good bots and bad bots. Good bots are often security scanners, deployed by internet service providers (ISPs) and email clients to protect users from malicious content. These bots click on links to check for phishing attempts, malware, or other harmful elements before the email even reaches the recipient's inbox. Blocking these types of clicks would be counterproductive, as it could signal to the ISP that your emails are attempting to evade security checks, potentially leading to deliverability issues.
On the other hand, bad bots are designed to manipulate metrics, scrape data, or engage in other undesirable activities. These can include bots that repeatedly click on links to inflate click-through rates (CTR) or trigger automated processes. While it might seem beneficial to have high click rates, artificially inflated data can mislead your marketing strategy and hide genuine engagement problems. You can learn more about how they skew metrics on Mailjet's guide to email bot clicks. Recognizing and filtering these bad bots from your analytics is crucial for accurate reporting and effective campaign optimization.
The primary goal of most bot clicks (also known as robot clicks or pre-clicks) is security. Email security systems use bots to scan all links within an email for potentially harmful content. This proactive scanning protects recipients from phishing and malware. Blocking these legitimate security scans can lead to a negative perception of your sending practices. It can make your emails appear suspicious, as if you are trying to hide something, which can result in your emails being flagged as spam or even triggering a blocklist (or blacklist) listing.
Conversely, accepting these clicks, even if they inflate your metrics, demonstrates compliance with security best practices. While data accuracy is important, prioritizing security and deliverability means allowing these pre-clicks to occur. Solutions exist to help you parse this data and understand the true human engagement, as explored in articles like Braze's guide to understanding bot clicks. It is a balance between maintaining sender reputation and obtaining meaningful insights.
Deliverability implications of bots
The impact of bot clicks on your email deliverability is a significant concern. While good bots are intended to protect recipients, their activity can inadvertently affect how ISPs perceive your sending behavior. If an excessive number of bot clicks originate from certain domains or IPs, it might trigger spam filters, especially if those clicks are disproportionate to human engagement. This can lead to your emails landing in the spam folder rather than the inbox.
Email service providers (ESPs) and mailbox providers (MBPs) are becoming more sophisticated at identifying and filtering bot activity. Many now attempt to differentiate between human and automated clicks, though this is an ongoing challenge. Your deliverability rates are a reflection of your sender reputation, which is influenced by various factors, including engagement metrics and complaint rates. Distorted metrics from bot clicks can make it difficult to accurately assess campaign performance and make informed decisions. Addressing this issue requires strategies to prevent bot clicks from hurting your reputation.
Positive aspects
Security scanning: Good bots (e.g., Cyberimpact security software) pre-scan links for malware and phishing, protecting recipients.
Deliverability confirmation:Bot clicks can confirm that an email was delivered and not immediately flagged as spam or phishing.
Negative aspects
Skewed metrics: Inflated open and click rates can give a false impression of campaign effectiveness, making it harder to optimize.
Reputation risk: Excessive or suspicious bot activity from your domain might negatively impact your sender reputation with mailbox providers.
To mitigate negative impacts, focus on authentic engagement. Maintain a clean email list, send relevant content, and adhere to best practices like proper authentication. By doing so, you build a strong sender reputation that can withstand some level of bot interference. Regularly review your campaign data, but apply a critical eye to identify potential bot activity. Tools can help you identify and mitigate the impact of bot clicks on your metrics.
Unsubscribe links and bot activity
Unsubscribe links are a critical component of email deliverability and compliance. They provide recipients with an easy way to opt out of your mailing list, which is essential for maintaining a healthy sender reputation and avoiding spam complaints. However, bot clicks on unsubscribe links introduce a unique challenge. Security bots often click every link in an email, including the unsubscribe link, to ensure there's no malicious redirection or hidden threats. If your unsubscribe process is set up to instantly remove a subscriber with a single click (a GET request), a bot's pre-click could inadvertently unsubscribe a legitimate user.
To prevent accidental unsubscribes by bots, it is crucial that your unsubscribe process requires an intentional user action, typically a POST request, after the initial link click. This means the user would click the unsubscribe link in the email, be directed to a landing page, and then need to confirm their unsubscribe action by clicking a button on that page. This two-step process ensures that only a human, who actively engages with the unsubscribe page, is removed from your list. While some interpret one-click unsubscribe to mean no page interaction, the true best practice involves user interaction on a landing page, typically via an HTTP POST operation, to change persistent state.
This method also provides an opportunity to offer a re-subscribe or undo option, which is beneficial for user experience and can recover some accidentally unsubscribed users. The impact of bot unsubscribe clicks on deliverability and reputation primarily arises from unintended subscriber loss, not directly from a negative signal to ISPs.
Here is an example of a secure unsubscribe flow:
Implementing a secure unsubscribe process
Initial click: The user clicks the unsubscribe link (which performs a GET request) in the email, redirecting them to a dedicated landing page.
Confirmation page: This page clearly states that the user is about to unsubscribe and requires an explicit action, like clicking a "Confirm Unsubscribe" button, which triggers a POST request.
Optional re-subscribe: Include a "Oops, I made a mistake, re-subscribe me" button for immediate reversal.
Post-request validation: Ensure your backend only processes the unsubscribe request after a valid POST action.
Managing click tracking for accurate metrics
Click tracking is a crucial tool for marketers to measure campaign performance, understand subscriber behavior, and optimize future sends. It allows you to see which content resonates most with your audience, identify popular links, and assess overall engagement. However, when bot clicks are not properly filtered, this data becomes unreliable. Inflated click-through rates can lead to false positives, making it seem like a campaign is performing better than it actually is. This can result in misinformed decisions about content strategy, segmentation, and send times.
Conversely, blindly blocking all bot clicks can also be detrimental. Since many bots are security scanners, blocking them could prevent crucial information from being gathered by ISPs, potentially harming your email deliverability. The goal isn't to eliminate all bot interactions, but rather to accurately identify and filter the data generated by non-human clicks. This ensures that your metrics reflect genuine human engagement, allowing for more precise campaign analysis and optimization. Effective bot detection and filtering are key here.
A comprehensive approach involves accepting all click tracking, including from bots, but then processing this data intelligently. Many email service providers now offer features or reporting that help distinguish between bot and human clicks. Additionally, you can look for patterns in your click data, such as extremely fast clicks after sending, clicks from unusual IP addresses or user agents, or clicks on every single link in an email. These patterns often indicate bot activity. By refining your analytics to account for these non-human interactions, you can gain a clearer picture of your campaign's true performance and ensure your marketing efforts are based on reliable data.
For example, monitoring your click data for rapid clicks immediately after send time, or clicks originating from security vendors, can help in identifying bot activity. This allows you to exclude these from your primary engagement metrics, giving you a more accurate view of human interaction without blocking beneficial security scanners.
Balancing security and data integrity
The choice between blocking and accepting click tracking and bots is not a simple yes or no. For good bots, particularly security scanners, the answer should almost always be to accept their activity. These bots play a vital role in protecting recipients and help to validate your emails as safe, which is ultimately beneficial for your deliverability. Attempting to block them can lead to your emails being flagged as suspicious, potentially pushing them into the spam folder or onto a blacklist.
For bad bots, the strategy shifts. While you shouldn't necessarily block their clicks at the server level if it risks deliverability, you should definitely filter their data from your analytics. This involves using advanced analytics and possibly implementing bot detection mechanisms within your email platform or website. The key is to differentiate between human and non-human interactions to ensure your engagement metrics are accurate and actionable. This approach allows you to reap the benefits of security scanning while still obtaining clean data for marketing optimization.
Ultimately, the implications for email deliverability and unsubscribe links revolve around trust and data integrity. By embracing security-focused bot activity and implementing robust unsubscribe processes, you build trust with ISPs and recipients. Simultaneously, by refining your data analysis to exclude irrelevant bot clicks, you maintain the integrity of your marketing metrics. This balanced approach is crucial for long-term email marketing success and robust deliverability in an increasingly complex email ecosystem.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Always allow good bots (security scanners) to click links. Blocking them can negatively impact deliverability and sender reputation.
Implement a two-step unsubscribe process requiring a POST request, preventing bot-triggered unsubscribes.
Utilize advanced analytics to filter bot clicks from your engagement metrics for accurate reporting.
Regularly monitor your email list hygiene and remove unengaged subscribers to improve overall deliverability.
Common pitfalls
Instantly unsubscribing users with a single GET request from an email link, risking bot-triggered unsubscribes.
Attempting to block good bots, which can make your emails appear suspicious to mailbox providers.
Relying on inflated click-through rates (CTR) from bot activity, leading to misinformed marketing decisions.
Not distinguishing between different types of bots, treating all automated clicks as malicious.
Expert tips
Examine user-agent strings and IP addresses in your click data to identify patterns associated with known bots. Some good bots will identify themselves in their user agent.
Implement honeypot links in your emails that are invisible to humans but detectable by bots, helping to identify and segment bot traffic.
Leverage the reporting features of your Email Service Provider (ESP) to filter out bot clicks, if available, for cleaner data.
Consider the trade-off: is slightly inflated click data worse than the potential deliverability hit from blocking security scanners?
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says the primary issue with bot clicks on unsubscribe links is the potential for losing legitimate subscribers.
2024-02-05 - Email Geeks
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says that good bots, which constitute the majority of bot traffic, scan links to ensure they are safe, and these should generally not be blocked.
2024-03-10 - Email Geeks
Key takeaways for email marketers
The world of email marketing is continuously evolving, and so are the mechanisms designed to protect recipients. Bot clicks, whether for security or malicious intent, are an undeniable part of this landscape. The key takeaway is not to fight against all automated interactions, but to understand them and adapt your strategies accordingly. Embracing the role of good bots by allowing their security scans supports your deliverability, as ISPs favor senders who demonstrate trustworthiness.
For accurate metrics and to prevent unintended subscriber loss, the focus should be on sophisticated data analysis and robust unsubscribe processes. By filtering bot activity from your engagement reports and ensuring a multi-step unsubscribe flow, you safeguard your data and your list. This allows you to focus on genuine human engagement, leading to more effective campaigns and a stronger sender reputation in the long run. By proactively managing bot interactions, you ensure your email program remains healthy and compliant.
