Click Inflation and the Rise of Bots: What Email Marketers Need to Know

In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, accurate metrics are crucial. Click-through rates (CTR) are a primary performance indicator for email campaigns, guiding everything from future content decisions to A/B testing strategies. But over the past few years, a growing issue has emerged—click inflation due to bot activity. This silent disruptor is skewing reports and leading to misleading insights for marketers trying to make data-backed decisions.

What’s Going On in the Marketing Industry?

Marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove ROI and deliver personalized, relevant content. As email continues to be a top-performing channel, attention has shifted to engagement metrics—especially clicks. But here’s the problem: many of those “clicks” aren’t coming from real humans. They’re coming from bots.

Click inflation can dramatically overstate the effectiveness of an email campaign, causing marketers to misallocate budget, overvalue certain segments, or miss opportunities to optimize based on real engagement. Understanding the cause—and how to counteract it—is now a critical part of email marketing strategy.

What is a Bot?

A bot (short for “robot”) is an automated software application designed to perform tasks. While the term often conjures images of malicious activity, not all bots are bad. In fact, many bots serve legitimate purposes, such as indexing content for search engines or scanning email links for malware.

Bots can be categorized into two main types:

• Good Bots – These include security scanners, spam filters, antivirus software, and monitoring tools. For example, email protection systems like Barracuda or Proofpoint often scan email links before delivering them to recipients.
• Bad Bots – These may perform malicious tasks like credential stuffing, scraping content, or launching DDoS attacks. In the email world, they may impersonate human clicks, inflate engagement metrics, or even trigger unintended actions.

How Bots Inflate Click Reports

Many email bots are designed to protect users by scanning the contents of incoming messages, including any hyperlinks. These scans often involve triggering the URLs in the email to look for malicious behavior or phishing attempts. If your email tracking includes JavaScript-based click tracking (common in modern ESPs), these bots can unintentionally inflate click metrics by executing the tracking code—making it appear that a recipient has clicked when no human has. B2B marketers are especially prone to these scanning bots because emails are directed to corporate accounts with sophisticated malware detection enabled.

Some bots even follow redirects, load external scripts, and interact with webpages in ways that closely resemble human behavior. This makes distinguishing real engagement from bot activity increasingly complex.

Not All Bots Are Malicious

It’s important to remember: the majority of bot activity in email engagement is protective, not hostile. Corporate email security solutions aim to keep users safe. However, the side effect is that marketers must now adjust their reporting and processes to account for this non-human traffic.

Identifying Click Inflation

If you’re seeing unusually high click rates immediately after sending an email—especially from corporate domains or B2B lists—it’s likely you’re experiencing bot inflation. Here are a few telltale signs:

• Clicks within seconds of send
• Every link in the email clicked
• No matching web sessions or conversions
• High engagement from corporate domains

How to Filter Bot Traffic

To mitigate the effects of bot-driven inflation, consider the following methods:

• Exclude known bot IP ranges from your reporting, if your ESP provides that level of granularity.
• Use a bot pixel to capture clicks that would be nearly impossible for humans to find in an email to assess the volume of bot traffic.
• Use behavioral triggers, like time on page or clicks on in-page buttons, to measure actual interest.
• Leverage UTM parameters and analytics tools like Google Analytics to cross-validate clicks with session data.
• Compare open timing with click timing using a timestamp to determine if clicks are happening faster than a human could read an email just opened.

Pro Tip –
One often-overlooked consequence of bot activity is false unsubscribe actions. Many email bots follow every link—including “unsubscribe”—resulting in single-click opt-outs without any user intent. To prevent this, it’s best practice to require a click on a confirmation webpage before completing the unsubscribe. This adds a layer of verification and protects against accidental removals.

Looking Ahead

The trend of bot activity in email is growing, and with it, the challenge of interpreting engagement data accurately. As email security continues to evolve, so must marketing analytics. Staying vigilant, refining measurement methods, and understanding the behavior behind the metrics are key to navigating this new normal. Some email platforms, such as Marketo and HubSpot, are more skilled at identifying and removing bot traffic from reports.

Bots aren’t going anywhere—but with smart strategy and careful reporting, marketers can ensure their decisions are based on human behavior.