Omnivery Research Finds Email Clicks Are Following Opens Into the Bot Era
State of Email Bots 2026 finds bot-generated consumer clicks have increased eightfold since 2023, while half of clicks
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Austin, TX, Aug. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Omnivery today released The State of Email Bots 2026, new research based on billions of real-world email engagement events showing that automated activity is rapidly undermining the metrics marketers, publishers and email platforms rely on to measure human engagement.
Approximately half of B2C email opens are now generated by machines, driven largely by Apple Mail Privacy Protection. But Omnivery’s research shows the same shift is now happening to the click.
In 2023, only about 2% of clicks on consumer B2C email were generated by bots. By 2026, that figure had climbed to approximately 16%, an eightfold increase.
The open is already lost. The click is turning.
“Email has spent the last several years adjusting to the reality that an open doesn’t necessarily mean a person opened an email,” said Jack Wrigley, President of Omnivery. “Now we’re seeing the same thing happen to the click. That matters because clicks don’t just appear on dashboards. They drive segmentation, automation, attribution, advertising payments and increasingly the data AI agents use to make decisions.”
The Same Click Means Different Things Depending on the Inbox
Omnivery analyzed B2C campaign engagement across 126 mailbox-provider families in six global regions and found dramatic differences in bot activity by provider.
Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail shows approximately 30% bot contamination among consumer clicks, while Apple iCloud has climbed to approximately 12%. Yahoo and GMX remain considerably lower at roughly 2–4%.
Gmail experienced one of the most striking changes. After holding around 6% through 2025 and early 2026, Gmail’s bot-click share jumped to approximately 22% in late February 2026 and remained there for more than 20 weeks. A pattern consistent with a network-wide change in link scanning or prefetching rather than a temporary bot campaign.
The result: a click no longer means the same thing across every mailbox provider.
On Bot Detection API Traffic, Half of Clicks Are Bots
A separate dataset of third-party traffic screened through Omnivery’s Bot Detection API shows an even more significant problem.
Bot clicks increased from 33.8% in 2025 to approximately 48% during the first half of 2026. In June, bots generated more than half of all screened clicks for the first time.
For businesses where clicks have financial value, the consequences are immediate. Newsletter platform Beehiiv uses Omnivery’s technology to protect its advertising ecosystem and is currently identifying more than $2 million per month in advertising fraud attributed to automated engagement.
A Bot Isn’t Always Fraud. But It Still Isn’t a Customer
Omnivery’s research also demonstrates why automated activity cannot be treated as a single category.
Corporate email security systems routinely inspect links before employees reach them. In Omnivery’s data, corporate and institutional domains protected by major security gateways can generate 80–95% automated clicks.
Automated newsletter archives create another distortion. In Q2 2026, Omnivery measured genuine consumer B2C clicks at 16.6% bot. When archive traffic was blended into the same dataset, the apparent bot rate jumped to 58%.
The distinction matters: privacy proxies, security scanners, crawlers and fraud bots have different purposes, but none represent a human choosing to engage with an email.
The Problem Is Bigger Than Email Reporting
Email engagement signals drive audience segmentation, lead scoring, automated campaigns, attribution and advertising payouts. Increasingly, those same signals are also feeding AI-driven marketing and personalization systems.
“If an AI system is learning from clicks without knowing whether those clicks came from customers, security scanners or bots, it isn’t learning customer behavior,” Wrigley said. “Identifying human engagement is quickly becoming a data-quality requirement, not just an email analytics problem.”
Omnivery recommends that organizations report human-only engagement metrics, separate consumer and corporate traffic, detect automated clicks before they reach attribution or advertising systems, and ensure marketing automation and AI models operate on human-classified engagement data.
About the Research
The State of Email Bots 2026 analyzes billions of email opens and clicks from 2020 through the first half of 2026. It includes Omnivery’s first-party B2C campaign engagement across 126 mailbox-provider families in six global regions and third-party traffic screened through Omnivery’s Bot Detection API.
Corporate security-scanner and newsletter archive traffic were analyzed separately to avoid distorting measurements of consumer engagement.
The complete State of Email Bots 2026 research and downloadable report are available from Omnivery here.
About Omnivery
About Omnivery Omnivery provides enterprise email infrastructure and technology for organizations and ESPs where communication cannot fail. Built around trust, reliability, intelligence and privacy, Omnivery helps customers deliver critical email worldwide and know whether the engagement behind it is actually human. Its Bot Detection API identifies non-human opens and clicks in real time, helping email platforms, publishers and marketers distinguish genuine human engagement from privacy proxies, security scanners, crawlers and fraudulent bots. Media & Research Inquiries hello@omnivery.com
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