Bots have existed for a very long time—well before the dawn of the World Wide Web. From the moment bots appeared, so did the need for tools to detect and suppress them. Bots always posed a security risk - discovering open server ports, unsecure scripts, and in general any means to exploit services.
Not all bots are necessarily bad though. Google uses thousands of good “bots” to crawl websites for the purpose of indexing each individual page. Once indexed the page can be found in their search - that is certainly something you would not want to get blocked. These crawlers identify themselves as such and are welcome by each site.
In contrast, malicious crawlers scour websites for vulnerabilities. While your internal security team might perform similar scans for protective purposes, it’s unwelcome when third parties do so. Malicious crawlers disregard your infrastructure, often overloading servers and causing outages. Worse, when they discover weaknesses, they may exploit them directly or share the information with other bots or botnets.
Fighting these bots is essential for every company. Services like Cloudflare Bot Protection, Akamai Bot Manager, and others specialize in combating them and minimizing their impact. Thanks to their vast reach, these providers can apply advanced heuristics based on traffic patterns. When suspicious activity is detected, they may issue a reCAPTCHA challenge, apply rate limits to allow further analysis, or block access entirely.
Marketers often use terms like “bot click” or “bot open,” but the more accurate term is “Non-Human Interactions” (NHI). The distinction is important: bots are generally malicious, while NHIs usually are not. This also means the strategies for handling each must be different.
The highest risk in emails is related to links directing recipients to abusive websites. Many think of fake bank sites when they hear the term phishing but the abuse goes much further. Scam sites take many forms—from impersonating government services and mimicking payment gateways to look-alike shops selling counterfeit products.
Identifying these links is a key step in message filtering by mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. Their systems must analyze the links in messages and determine the associated risks. Some are flagged as toxic immediately, but most require deeper inspection. This involves following the links and scanning the target pages.It is this scanning that generates what marketers call a “bot click.”. Because links in emails are typically “tracking links”, any interaction with them is recorded and can easily be misinterpreted as genuine user activity.
Using Bot detection services built for the web to identify Non-Human Interactions in emails will do more harm than anything else.
They may correctly identify some “bots,” but their false-positive rates are inherently high due to the wide variation in email response patterns.
Applying restrictions or blocking—as is common in web bot detection—further complicates matters. Message filtering engines may treat inaccessible targets as potentially malicious, which can negatively impact inbox placement and, in some cases, prevent delivery altogether by causing messages to be rejected.
In email, context is critical. Hundreds or even thousands of clicks within seconds from the same network may not indicate an anomaly at all, but rather users legitimately responding to an email they have just received. Omnivery Bot Detection was built with this critical distinction in mind.
Unlike heuristic-based approaches, our detection is powered by more than eight years of proprietary data and expertise. We never block messages—instead, we provide precise identification of non-human interactions. This allows customers to suppress false signals in reporting and automation triggers, gives marketers a clearer view of genuine recipient engagement, and equips deliverability specialists with the insights needed to resolve issues effectively. Beyond NHI, Omnivery Bot Detection also helps publishers protect their ad networks by identifying ad link click abuse, saving advertisers millions of dollars each month.
Together, these advantages deliver a single, powerful outcome: sustainable growth built on accurate, reliable, data-driven results.