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How Recart filters bot clicks on SMS messages

When you send an SMS campaign, not every click on your links comes from a real person. Recart automatically filters out non-human clicks, so the click rates and revenue numbers you see in your dashboard reflect actual subscribers.

Where bot clicks come from

Before a text message reaches a phone, it often passes through automated systems that open every link in it:

  • Carrier security scanners — mobile carriers scan links in messages to check for phishing and spam.

  • Device and app link previews — some phones and messaging apps fetch a link to generate a preview.

  • Security software — corporate and antivirus tools open links to inspect them.

Each of these opens your link exactly like a click. Without filtering, they get counted as engagement — inflating your click rate and making your conversion rate look worse than it really is.

How the filtering works

Recart checks every click at the moment it happens, using two independent layers:

  1. Bot signature detection — a continuously updated database of known bots, crawlers, and scanners.

  2. Behavioral bot scoring — powered by Cloudflare, the network that sits in front of roughly one in five of all websites on the internet. Because Cloudflare sees traffic at that scale, its bot detection recognizes automated visitors by how they behave, not just by what they call themselves — including scanners that disguise themselves as regular phones. Rather than building a bot filter in-house, we plugged Recart into one of the most widely deployed bot-detection systems in existence — the same protection used by some of the largest sites on the web.

If either layer identifies the visitor as a bot, the click is excluded from your analytics. The link itself still works normally — filtering never blocks or slows down anyone, it only decides what gets counted.

What this means for your numbers

  • Click rates in Recart may look lower than on other platforms. If your previous SMS tool counted bot clicks, its click rates were inflated. Lower-but-real numbers are the ones you can plan against.

  • Your conversion rate and revenue-per-click are more accurate. Because the denominator only contains real people, you can trust these numbers when deciding what to send next.

  • No setup needed. Filtering is always on, for every message, on every plan.

Frequently asked questions

  1. Does filtering ever block a real subscriber?

    No. Every visitor is redirected to your store regardless of classification. Filtering only affects whether the click appears in your analytics.

  2. Can I see the filtered clicks somewhere?

    No — bot clicks are excluded before they reach your reports, so there is no separate bot report.

  3. Why does my link show a click before the message could have been read?

    That's typically a carrier scanner opening the link right after sending. This is exactly the traffic Recart filters out of your stats.

 

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the Customer Support team, we are always happy to help. 😊