Why Is My Email Click Rate Dropping In 2026?

Why is your email click rate dropping even when your content, CTA, and audience haven't changed much? I want to tell you that the problem may not be your email at all. It could be bot clicks from email security scanners.

Email security systems scan links to protect users from phishing and malicious websites. But when those scanners follow the links in your emails, your ESP can record those actions as clicks. M3AAWG's Non-Human Interactions study found that automated activity can account for 20% to 80% of recorded clicks on B2B email, compared with under 10% on B2C sends.

The problem starts when you use those inflated numbers as your benchmark. A campaign can appear to have strong engagement because scanners are clicking your links, and then look like it is underperforming when that scanning activity changes. Your real audience may not have changed at all.

In this article, I explain why security scanners create these false clicks, how to identify them using timestamps, IPs, and other signals, and how to filter them from your reports.

One of the numbers most misunderstood in email marketing is the email click rate. When click numbers start falling, many marketing teams assume something is wrong. They rewrite subject lines, redesign templates, or attribute the offer to the sender. But before making changes, look deeper at what the metric actually is telling you.

Email click rate is the percentage of emails that were delivered and resulted in one or more clicks. Put another way, did your email provide them with a strong enough reason to continue the conversation?

A low click rate does not automatically point to a deliverability problem. Sometimes the offer is not compelling enough. In other cases, the CTA is easy to miss, the messaging misses the mark, or the content simply doesn't match what subscribers expected.

So, what is a good email click rate you must look at? Let's get into it.

Benchmarks vary by industry and device, but most reported averages include unfiltered email bot traffic. Treat these numbers as a starting point when setting your own email click rate benchmark.

Average click-through rate sits at 2.44% across industries, with legal leads in all sectors at 4.90%. These industry averages already include bot-inflated data, so they are not a clean target. For your own reporting, compare click rates after removing clicks you have identified as likely scanner activity.

For benchmarks by device and industry, see this click-through rate guide.

A low email click rate does not always mean your content quality has changed. It is falling because the bot traffic that once inflated it has shifted or dropped.

Every marketing link runs through your ESP's tracking domain before it redirects to the real page. A security gateway may treat the tracked redirect like any other URL it needs to inspect for potential threats.

Time-of-click systems like Safe Links add a second layer of scanning. They recheck the same link the moment a human actually clicks it. One email interaction can generate multiple logged clicks from a combination of automated scans and human activity. That inflated number becomes your team's baseline within a few campaigns, and no dashboard separates scanner activity from reader activity.

Gateways like Mimecast, Proofpoint, and Barracuda inspect every inbound message before it reaches a mailbox. They open embedded links to check destination reputation against threat databases. Proofpoint's URL Defense, for example, rewrites links and routes every click through a sandbox first. That sandbox visit can register as a click in your ESP within seconds of send.

A campaign sent to enterprise inboxes shows more email bot traffic than personal Gmail or Yahoo accounts. This can make B2B click rates look unusually high when scanning activity is heavy, then appear to drop when that activity decreases.

Microsoft Defender Safe Links can rewrite links in inbound email to a Safe Links URL for inspection. At delivery, Defender can prefetch that rewritten link to check it before the message lands. Safe Links also runs a second, time-of-click scan when a user actually selects the link. Both events can log as separate clicks depending on your ESP's tracking setup.

Organizations with strict Safe Links policies generate more prefetch activity than those with lighter settings. For lists heavy in Outlook and Microsoft 365 users, this is usually the single largest source of inflated clicks. Microsoft's own advanced-hunting data confirms these events originate from Microsoft-owned IP ranges.

Wrapped links follow a fixed and matchable structure:

Flag any click landing on this domain pattern before it reaches your engagement report.

Endpoint antivirus tools and network appliances also crawl links found in incoming email. Some detonate a link in an isolated sandbox to observe its behavior before allowing delivery. This check often runs independently of gateway-level scanning.

A single email can pass through three or four scanning layers: gateway, sandbox, endpoint, and time-of-click re-check. Each layer can register its own click event. Stack these on top of real human clicks, and the total bears little resemblance to actual engagement.

Bot clicks in email marketing happen when automated software opens links instead of a human recipient. The four scanner types above account for most of this activity. There are two additional sources that contribute to that.

There are no systems here that require human reading of your subject line, nor do they require human determination of click. In many cases, these clicks are recorded almost immediately after the email lands in the inbox, long before a real person reads the message.

The process is fairly consistent. The email is delivered, a security system scans the link, the URL is opened automatically, and your tracking system records the event as a click.

Four signals expose this pattern in raw data. A click timestamp lands within seconds of delivery, faster than any human opens a message. The click's IP address falls inside a known data center or hosting range instead of a residential ISP.

A CTOR above 100% is unusual and can be a signal that automated activity or tracking differences are affecting your data. When every link in the same send fires within milliseconds, a sandbox may be scanning them in sequence.

In this example, your dashboard reports a 50% lift in engagement that does not exist. If scanner volume drops to 20 next time, the report can show an email click rate decline. Real clicks stayed flat at 100 the whole time.

Knowing how to identify bot clicks in email campaigns makes filtering easier and more consistent. These four steps turn that detection into a repeatable filtering process you can run on every campaign.

Start by flagging clicks that happen within 5 seconds of send as suspect. Clicks that occur almost immediately after delivery are often automated, although timing alone should not be used as definitive proof. Compare the click time with the delivery time for each item in your log file. Most ESPs, including HubSpot and Klaviyo, reveal this timestamp information that can be explored to compare with delivery and click events.

Create a list of user-agent strings for known security vendors such as Mimecast, Proofpoint and Microsoft ATP. Combine with a data-center IP range list, filtered by ASN, from MaxMind or IP2Location. Also, update both lists quarterly as vendors change infrastructure and introduce new scanning services.

Use your detection rule and exclusion list before clicks go into your engagement reports. Almost all ESPs have custom segments or filtered views for just this reason. If your platform doesn't support this, you can filter raw click exports in a spreadsheet or BI tool.

Once bot clicks are excluded, recalculate your click rate and CTOR from the filtered data. This filtered number is your real baseline. Compare future campaigns against this new baseline. Expect this filtered number to be lower than what you are used to seeing.

A clean list is another part of the equation. Invalid or risky email addresses can be a headache. They can cause bounces and, over time, affect your email deliverability. Before hitting send, Clearout Email Verifier helps you check your list and catch bad addresses. This means you can clean them out beforehand and focus on reaching subscribers who are actually there. That creates a healthier starting point for improving click rates.

Once your baseline is real, optimization actually works. These four practices target genuine human engagement instead of chasing inflated scanner activity.

Document the filtered click rate as your new internal benchmark going forward. Share this number with stakeholders so nobody compares future reports to the old inflated figure. A clear baseline reset prevents false alarm reporting when bot volume naturally fluctuates.

Monitor click-to-open ratio using clicks and opens after removing suspected scanner activity. This trend line is a more reliable signal of content performance than raw click rate. A rising human CTOR over time means your subject lines and content are actually working.

Identify which domains in your list generate the highest bot-click share. Outlook, Hotmail, and large corporate domains usually top this list. Report on these domains separately so their scanner noise does not skew your overall numbers.

B2B emails sent to corporate inboxes are more likely to encounter security scanners and link-checking tools than B2C emails sent to personal inboxes. So, click metrics in B2B campaigns can be inflated by automated activity.

Leaving bot clicks in your reporting has real costs. Sales teams waste hours chasing "engaged" leads that were actually security scanners. Marketing budgets get allocated based on inflated engagement, and stakeholders lose confidence when click metrics fail to match pipeline results.

Filter bot clicks before evaluating campaign performance or content quality. Once you have a good engagement baseline, make sure you're also sending valid contacts. A verified email list helps reduce bounce rates, protect deliverability, and keep future campaign data accurate.