Episode Details

In this episode of Global Economic Press, Alex Brady discusses the findings of Omnivery's latest research, The State of Email Bots 2026, which highlights the growing influence of automated activity on email engagement metrics. The research, available on Omnivery's website at https://omnivery.com, reveals a significant rise in bot-generated email clicks, a trend that poses challenges for marketers, publishers, and email platforms worldwide. The study shows that while only about 2% of clicks on business-to-consumer emails were generated by bots in 2023, this figure is projected to rise to approximately 16% by 2026, indicating an eightfold increase. This shift in email engagement metrics could have profound implications for digital marketing strategies, as clicks are crucial for segmentation, automation, attribution, and advertising payments.

Omnivery's research analyzed email engagement across 126 mailbox-provider families in six global regions, uncovering dramatic differences in bot activity by provider. For instance, Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail show approximately 30% bot contamination among consumer clicks, while Apple iCloud has reached around 12%. Gmail experienced a notable increase, with bot-click share jumping to approximately 22% in early 2026. The study also highlights the importance of distinguishing between different types of automated activity, such as privacy proxies, security scanners, crawlers, and fraud bots, as none represent genuine human engagement. Omnivery recommends that organizations focus on reporting human-only engagement metrics and ensure that marketing automation and artificial intelligence models operate on human-classified data to maintain data quality and accuracy in understanding customer behavior.