Why do I get inflated clicks on my Linkly links?

Sometimes, Linkly's link figures are higher than you expect.

The main reasons are:

• When sharing links, particularly on social networks, or via email/SMS marketing, the platforms will open the links to check for spam and generate previews.
• Browsers/apps on your desktop computer may open the links in the background, so that a click-through appears instantaneous.

These non-human visitors are often referred to as robots.

Linkly records all traffic, both human and otherwise.

Identifying Robot Traffic

In Linkly’s traffic reports, click the Robots tab in the panel below at the bottom:

For this particular link, you can see that only about 32% was identified as human, and all the rest were robots.

Filtering robot traffic out of reports

1. Enter the traffic reports, by click Traffic on the left-hand sidebar, or Report from a link.
2. At the top of the page, click the Filter Robots button:

Filter robots with the filter enabled

Blocking Robots

Linkly can block robots from opening your links.

Be careful with this setting. If social networks cannot open your link, they may automatically mark it as spam.

1. Create a new link by clicking Create New Link from the sidebar and filling in a destination.
2. Under Block bots & spiders, set the switch to on:

Robots that visit your link see a 404 Not Found message.

Appendix: How Linkly detects Bots

Linkly has two principal mechanisms for detecting robot traffic:

• Some bots announce themselves as such (such as Googlebot or FacebookExternalHit). These are easy to identify.
• For bots that do not announce themselves, we see if the IP address of the visitor belongs to a cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft. These are server farms and generally traffic from here tends to be automated.