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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.
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.
Bot-click share by consumer email provider (Omnivery)
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