Improve your click and open reports' accuracy
Unnaturally high click and open volumes in your reports may be due to bot activity rather than your subscribers engaging with your emails.
This bot activity can be problematic, but you can filter it out for cleaner reporting data.
Here's what you need to know about bot clicks and opens and how to enable (or disable) bot activity filtering for your reports.
What are bot clicks and opens?
Bot clicks are clicks of your emails' links by automated computer programs (also known as bots), while bot opens are when these bots open your emails.
Email clients use bots to check for and take action against security threats. For example, if an email client discovers that an email link leads to a malicious or suspicious-looking website, the email client can send the email to the recipient's spam folder—or even block the email from reaching the recipient.
Email clients also use bots to protect user privacy. We track opens by embedding an invisible 1-pixel image in your emails: when the image loads, we record the email as opened. So, when bots automatically open your emails, that image loads too, causing us to record the email as opened even if the recipient hasn't opened it yet.
Bot usage is especially common in Apple Mail, Gmail, and email clients managed by corporate and educational institutions.
How bot activity affects your email marketing
While bot clicks and opens help protect users, they can artificially inflate your Kit reports' metrics, making them inaccurate.
These metrics include:
Click counts, whether for clicks of text links, Newsletter Sponsorships, or other links
Open counts, especially for email clients like Apple Mail and Gmail, which have built-in privacy features (more on this below)
Engagement scoring, which uses clicks (and other activity) to determine how engaged subscribers are with your emails
Bot clicks can also falsely trigger Link Triggers, like adding subscribers to Tags or Email Sequences even though they hadn't clicked the Link Triggers themselves.
Filtering bot activity
Kit uses several sophisticated heuristics to identify bot activity. These heuristics include:
IP address and known cloud hosting locations
User agent (where we can identify known automated systems by their signatures)
Click speed (how quickly after delivery a link was clicked)
Click proximity (how quickly a link was clicked after a previous click)
Once we've identified bot activity, we'll exclude it if you've enabled bot activity filtering.
How to enable (or disable) bot activity filtering
Scroll down the advanced settings to the Bot filtering section. Then, use the Filter bot clicks and Filter bot opens toggles to enable (or disable) bot click and bot open filtering, respectively.
Click Save changes to save your changes.
What happens when you enable bot activity filtering
For bot click filtering
When you enable bot click filtering:
Bot clicks won't appear in your reports. As a result, you may see a drop in click rates—sometimes significantly. This is to be expected, because your reports now reflect real engagement more accurately.
Bot clicks won't trigger Link Triggers.
Bots can still reach your links. Filtering bots doesn't block their access to your links, so your destination URLs will always load normally. We just won't count bot clicks in your reports or trigger actions from them.
Your filtering setting applies only to future bot activity. Enabling (or disabling) bot click filtering won't change historical reporting data.
Filtered clicks cannot be recovered or reclassified later. We currently don't offer a way of seeing which clicks were dropped from our systems.
Your email reports' click counts may differ from the click counts reported by the pages you link to. These pages might use different methods to check for and exclude bot clicks.
We strongly recommend enabling bot click filtering so that your reports reflect true engagement behavior.
For bot open filtering
When you enable bot open filtering:
Bot opens will be removed from your reports, but human opens hidden behind Apple Mail Privacy Protection, Gmail Image Proxy, and similar systems will continue to be untrackable. These systems load your email's tracking pixel image within seconds of delivery—before your subscribers ever open your email. When subscribers later open it for real, their email client shows the image from its own cache instead of asking Kit for it again, so we have no way of detecting the genuine open. (This happens regardless of whether bot open filtering is enabled or disabled.)
Resending to unopens will risk sending to subscribers who did open. With bot open filtering enabled, our systems disregard all tracking pixel data about email opens—by both bots and humans—so we can't distinguish genuine opens from bot ones. As a result, some "unopens" may actually be subscribers who did open, and they'd get a duplicate email if you resend it.
When bot open filtering is disabled, resending to unopens may reach fewer subscribers than it should. This is because our systems count bot opens as real opens even if subscribers don't actually open the email. That said, you can be confident that everyone who gets the resend genuinely hasn't opened the initial one.
Your filtering setting applies only to future bot activity. Enabling (or disabling) bot open filtering won't change historical reporting data.
Filtered opens cannot be recovered or reclassified later. We currently don't offer a way of seeing which opens were dropped from our systems.
In short, enabling bot open filtering helps filter bot opens from your reports, but it often doesn't improve your ability to track whether your recipients themselves actually opened your emails.
So, our recommendation is to rely on clicks and other downstream behaviors (like replies, unsubscribes, and conversions) to measure engagement, rather than open rates.
If you have automations that take actions when subscribers open your emails, we also recommend updating them to use click-based conditions wherever possible.