Bone clicks
Bone clicks, also called bot clicks or machine-generated clicks, are automated link interactions triggered by security scanning systems or email filtering tools rather than by a real human reading the email.
When an email arrives in a corporate inbox, security software often scans every link in the message to check for malware or phishing attempts. This scanning can register as a click in your email platform’s analytics, even though no human has actually seen or engaged with the email. Similarly, some email clients and inbox providers use automated systems that pre-load links for caching purposes, generating additional non-human click events.
Bone clicks are a significant data quality problem for email marketers. They inflate click rates, distort click-to-open ratios, and can make automated workflows fire incorrectly. If your automation triggers a follow-up sequence when a contact clicks a specific link, and that click was actually a security scanner rather than a human, the follow-up goes out at the wrong time to a contact who has not actually engaged. This can harm both your metrics and your recipient relationships.
Modern email platforms use various techniques to filter out non-human interactions, including checking for clicks that occur within milliseconds of delivery, identifying when all links in an email are clicked simultaneously (a behaviour pattern unique to bots), and cross-referencing click data with known security scanning IP ranges. Enabling these filters in your platform settings, where available, gives you a significantly cleaner picture of actual human engagement.
How can I tell if a click was a bone click or a real click?
Some signals that a click was machine-generated rather than human: the click occurred within seconds of the email being delivered; all links in the email were clicked at nearly the same time; the click came from an IP address associated with a known security scanning service; or the click was not followed by any meaningful activity such as time on page or further navigation. Most enterprise email platforms now have bone click filtering options built in. Check your platform’s settings or deliverability documentation.
Do bone clicks affect email deliverability?
Bone clicks themselves do not directly harm deliverability, but they distort the engagement metrics that inbox providers use to assess sender reputation over time. If your platform reports inflated click rates due to bot activity, and you use those metrics to inform segmentation decisions (for example, re-engaging contacts who have not clicked recently), you may be suppressing or re-engaging contacts based on inaccurate data. The indirect impact on programme quality is more significant than any direct deliverability effect.
Are bone clicks the same as bot clicks?
The terms are often used interchangeably. Some platforms specifically use ‘bone clicks’ to describe clicks generated by security scanning systems within email clients, while ‘bot clicks’ is a broader term that also covers automated clicks in paid advertising contexts. In email analytics, both terms refer to the same problem: automated, non-human interactions that inflate click data and require filtering for accurate performance measurement.