Glossary
Bot traffic: the clicks no person ever made
Bot traffic is automated requests that look like visits. Where it comes from on a short link, how gc.mw separates it, and why your first minute of clicks is usually fake.
By Wasim Idrishi · Updated · 2 min read
Bot traffic is automated requests that arrive at a link without a person behind them: crawlers, link previewers, security scanners, uptime monitors and scrapers.
Where it comes from on a short link
Preview fetchers are the biggest source, and they are instant. Post a link in Slack and Slackbot fetches it before your colleagues have read the message; the same is true of WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Apple's previewer. Corporate mail gateways detonate every URL in an incoming message before delivery, which is why a link mailed to one enterprise can register several visits before anyone opens the email.
Then there are search crawlers, uptime checks, and the ambient background of scanners walking short code spaces looking for something interesting.
How gc.mw separates it
Two mechanisms. A user agent on the crawler list is recognised on the redirect path itself, and no click is queued for it at all; if the link also carries custom preview metadata, the crawler gets a preview page instead of the redirect. Everything else is classified later, off the hot path, where a user-agent library and — behind Cloudflare — the edge bot score do the work. A request scoring below the configured threshold is marked as a bot.
Marked events increment a bots counter on that link's day and stop there. They never join clicks,
uniques, or any of the country, referrer, device, operating-system, browser, language or campaign
breakdowns. Bot detection is a judgement, not a fact, so keeping the number visible is more honest than
silently discarding it.
What to do about it
Read the first hour of a new link with suspicion, especially if the link went to a group chat. Compare uniques rather than clicks. And if a single link is drowning in automated traffic, that is often the first sign it is being scanned because someone reported it.
Example
A link posted in three Slack workspaces and mailed to 400 people showed 512 clicks and 47 bots on day one. The bots were previews and mail-gateway fetches; the 512 were people. Without the split, the launch looks 9% better than it was.
Inspect a link's status, certificate and safety verdict with the link checker.
Questions people ask
Why did my link get clicks the moment I posted it?
Link previews. Slack, WhatsApp, X, LinkedIn and every mail scanner fetch a link to build a card the instant it is posted. Requests from a known preview agent never reach the redirect at all — they get a preview page — and anything else identified as a bot is counted in a separate bucket.
Are bots removed from my numbers?
They are separated, not deleted. A bot request increments a bots counter for that link and day and is excluded from clicks, uniques and every breakdown — country, referrer, device, browser, campaign. You can see how much of your traffic was automated instead of wondering.
Keep going
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