Last week, I wrote about the impact that bots and AI scraping are having on publishers here in the United States and, more extensively, around Europe.
A recent report on email bots and the associated engagement metrics found what A Media Operator said “might soon force publishers to change course and move toward the ‘verified click.’”
“Opens and clicks are the two signals the entire email industry runs on,” says Omnivery’s State of Email Bots 2026 report. “Open rates, clickthrough rates, send-time optimization, ‘most engaged’ segments, and ad payouts all rely on opens and clicks. And a fast-growing share of both is no longer human.”
The study points to a rising number of proxies, scanners, and bots that influence engagement and “quietly distort every decision” marketers and advertisers make around them. For instance, nearly half of B2C email opens are bots, while the rate in click-bots rose from 2% in 2023 to 16% this year.
“The click picture varies sharply by mailbox provider,” says the report, which found Outlook/Hotmail to be the “most bot-contaminated” of the major email providers with a 30% share, followed by Gmail with over 20%, up from single-digits just last year. “Gmail’s rise wasn’t gradual — it was a switch. … The shape — a clean ~3.5× step, sustained and network-wide rather than tied to any single campaign — points to a change by Gmail (most likely more aggressive link prefetching/scanning), not a botnet.”
Omnivery’s “measure humans, not machines” recommendations include reporting human-only open and click rates, segment by recipient types, and protecting the click — “the last human signal and the one fraud monetizes.”