Why Your Newsletter Click Rate Is Inflated by Email Scanners
Email security scanners click links before your readers do. Here’s how that distorts click rates, how to spot it, and what to do about it.
You send an issue. Within seconds, every link in it has been clicked. Not just the popular ones: the unsubscribe link, the sponsor’s terms, the link to last month’s issue. Nobody reads that fast.
What you’re seeing are email security scanners.
What scanners do
Many companies, schools and email providers protect their users by checking links before a person sees them. When your newsletter arrives, a scanner opens each link to make sure it doesn’t lead somewhere malicious. Some also load every image.
To your email platform, that looks exactly like a reader clicking. So it gets counted.
This is good for security. It’s bad for your numbers.
How it distorts what you see
- Click rates go up, especially if many readers use work email addresses.
- Every link looks interesting, because scanners click all of them equally.
- Click maps flatten out. The difference between the link people loved and the one nobody cared about shrinks.
- One-click actions misfire. Any link that does something when clicked, such as a vote, a confirmation or an RSVP, gets triggered by a machine.
How to spot scanner clicks
Scanner traffic has a recognisable shape:
- Timing. Clicks within seconds of delivery, before a human could plausibly read the email.
- Breadth. Every link in the email clicked by the same recipient at once.
- Odd links. Clicks on links nobody normally clicks, such as legal pages and footers.
- Concentration. Spikes from recipients at the same company or domain.
Some email platforms now flag or filter “bot clicks”. If yours does, check whether the filter is on and what it counts.
Why this matters for reader feedback
If you use links to collect feedback (a row of “Loved this / Too long” links, for example), scanners are a real problem. A scanner will click every option, so your feedback becomes noise: equal votes for everything, arriving seconds after you hit send.
What IssuePulse does about it
IssuePulse feedback links are built for this. When a vote link is clicked:
- Known scanners and prefetchers are recognised and dropped before a vote is recorded.
- The scanner sees the same page a reader would, so it gets no signal that it was filtered.
- Embed opens are de-duplicated: repeat image loads from the same reader inside 5 minutes count once, so email-client re-scans don’t inflate open counts.
No filter catches everything. We’d rather show you a slightly low count than one inflated by robots, and we keep adding scanners to the list as we find them.
What you can do today
- Don’t read click rate as interest. Treat it as an upper bound.
- Compare issues, not absolute numbers. Scanners inflate every issue roughly equally, so the change from one issue to the next is still useful.
- Watch the first minute. A burst of clicks right after sending is mostly machines.
- Use feedback that filters. If you want to know what readers thought, make sure the tool counting their answers can tell them apart from a scanner.
Try IssuePulse free and see votes from readers, not robots.