Advertisers Could Soon Demand ‘Verified Clicks’
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A state of the email bots report from email sending platform Omnivery shows the extent to which big tech titans are influencing the inbox and having an impact on the email metrics publishers leverage for tracking engagement, which might soon force publishers to change course and move toward the “verified click.”
As reported by AMO earlier this year, bot clicks, which were thought to only be a problem with corporate email inboxes, are infiltrating consumer inboxes and newsletters.
A bot click, very simply, is an automated interaction with an email. While it sounds malicious, it usually isn’t. It is typically generated by the email provider’s security systems, which do pre-fetching and scanning of links before an email gets delivered. B2C bot clicks have increased from 2% in 2023 to 16% this year, according to Omnivery’s new report.
The report, which leverages its own first-party data from messages delivered to 126 mailbox providers across six regions as well as third-party data from other email service providers (ESPs) that route through Omnivery’s bot detection API, reveals more about what is going on under the hood.
!Image 2 _How Omnivery detects bot clicks (Omnivery)_
**No Inbox Is Safe**
Google’s Gmail, which was once considered a haven from bot clicks, has seen a substantial spike in bot contamination, surging from 2% to over 20% through 2026, while Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail is the most bot-contaminated of the major mailbox providers, according to the report.
The change in bot contamination at Gmail is likely coming from more aggressive link prefetching and scanning. In the past two years, Google has put a lot of effort into enforcing email authentication and fighting bad actors, which, as a result, means their filtering has become more aggressive, Jakub Olexa, CEO of Omnivery, told AMO. Similarly, they’ve changed some data vendors, resulting in changes in how they do things in the inbox, he said. ESPs deliberately try to obfuscate their scanning and pre-fetching to counteract bad actors; as Gmail is one of the most sophisticated providers, it’s likely some of this obfuscation has contributed to the lower bot contamination figures over the years. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
!Image 3 _Bot-click share by consumer email provider (Omnivery)_
Omnivery’s bot detection API, which determines if a click is a human or bot, is based on eight years of work, which has helped it to identify the recent shift in Gmail’s behavior. It leverages a huge dataset on what is human and what isn’t, combined with data sources that aren’t publicly available, Olexa said. He describes the detection process as far superior to what ESPs can do in-house, with many of those providers surprised at the gap between Omnivery’s API analysis and their own.
Olexa expects that Gmail’s bot contamination will sustain at this level, and potentially move even higher. With email providers constantly trying to obfuscate this scanning to prevent bad actors, it’s a race for services like Omnivery’s to keep up and ensure clients know how many humans versus bots are interacting with their emails.
Automated archive services, which either subscribe to consumer newsletters for market research purposes or to pull discount codes across newsletters like MilledMail, were also responsible for an episodic spike in consumer clicks in the second quarter of this year. Consumer clicks were 16% bots, but adding archive data back in, the bot metric reached 58%.
!Image 4 _Archives impact on B2C bot-click rate (Omnivery)_
“Meta’s link crawler accounts for the large majority of archive clicks (roughly 84%) and essentially the entire 2026 surge, concentrated on milledmail.com and nuslet.cz,” the report said. “When a newsletter’s links surface on Meta’s platforms, its crawler fetches every one, and each fetch registers as a click. It is benign in intent – a social crawler, not fraud or a scanner – but it is the single biggest distorter of raw click metrics in the data.” Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
**The Rise of the Verified Click**
“We probably first noticed an influx of clicks and abnormally high click-through rates probably about 18 months ago or so,” said Tyler Denk, co-founder and CEO of newsletter platform Beehiiv, in an email to AMO. “We had a lot of publishers reach out asking why their click-through rates were so high. After chatting with other email people at other companies, we realized that it wasn’t unique to us but rather was an industry-wide trend.”
Beehiiv saved over $14 million in ad spend over six months by integrating Omnivery’s bot detection API to combat ad fraud within its ad network, which enables newsletter creators to monetize their content.
“Most ESPs either take an opinionated stance and do no filtering and just feed you raw clicks, and others may choose to only serve filtered clicks,” Denk added. “We opted to show both and allow our users to determine which is most helpful for them. We introduced a metric called verified clicks, which goes through several layers of filtering where we can confidently say that those clicks are 100% human-generated.”
Jack Wrigley, the president of Omnivery, expects more publishers and operators will see the value in the “verified click,” with media operators able to demand a premium for clicks that are guaranteed to be human. Beehiiv only charges advertisers for verified clicks. “We could certainly make more revenue by charging for all clicks, but we don’t believe that is fair to our advertisers or best positions them to succeed,” Denk said.
Beehiiv’s competitor Substack did not respond to a request for a comment around how it tackles bot clicks. Several other publishers with newsletters choose either not to respond to AMO or said they were unfamiliar with bot clicks.
Awareness might need to increase quickly as advertisers are starting to expect data on bot clicks, said Dan Oshinsky, who runs email consultancy Inbox Collective. “Advertisers are absolutely asking publishers to prove that they’re filtering out bot clicks,” he said. “I’ve seen cases where an ad might appear to get thousands of clicks — but once you’ve filtered out the bot clicks, the number drops into the hundreds or even tens.“
“Publishers need to be prepared to answer how they’re filtering out bots, either through their email platform or a third-party tool, like Glueletter,” he added. “One thing I recommend: Share with an advertiser both the unfiltered and filtered clicks. That way, the advertiser knows that you’ve taken steps to give them the most accurate number.”