We’ve just released a new feature in Flowcode 2 that went into effect on September 24, 2025 in an effort to reduce inflated data in your campaigns. This latest feature is a toggle that allows you to filter out ‘bot traffic’ from our reporting data to ensure that all the scans and click traffic you see on your portal comes from humans. By default, this feature will be toggled on to automatically filter out your bot traffic.
Let’s take a step back – why does this matter?
Significant amounts of internet traffic can come from non-human automated sources, otherwise known as ‘bots’. In the interest of providing our customers with the most reliable scan and click data, we’ve created this automated system to monitor online traffic sources to Flowcodes and Short URLs. This system parses through all the traffic to filter out any ‘non-human’ sources from your analytics dashboard. Automatically filtering out unhelpful “noise” from your data empowers you to gather more robust insights from our reporting platform.
What does this mean for you as a Flowcode user?
As a result of this update, you might see a drop in your past and future analytics (scans, clicks, or other impressions). Through our analysis, we estimate most customers won’t notice a significant drop in overall historical or incoming impressions. However, a small subset of users or specific Flowcodes and Short URLs have been disproportionately hit by bot traffic, so this drop may be substantial.
Why is this update important?
Flowcode prioritizes our platform integrity above all. A significant aspect of this is ensuring we provide you with reliable data by filtering the traffic sources your page scans, views, and clicks originate from. As a Flowcode user, you know that data tells powerful stories and drives important decisions. However, data becomes much less helpful when it’s diluted by extra noise. Through the Flowcode platform, you’re seeking to track engagement from customers such as: how many people scanned, clicked, and converted, from your campaign efforts in order to successfully attribute your marketing spend and learn about your customers. Our new Bot filtering measures ensure your analytics deliver the most reliable and relevant data so that you can gather better insights.
What are ‘bots’? How do you identify them?
Some traffic may come from bots—automated software that imitates scans, clicks, and browsing—which can inflate your reports. Bots aren’t inherently bad; many power search engines, flag malicious content, and run routine checks. Common types include crawlers, scrapers, and other automated tools from browsers, apps, or users. Today, they drive over half of internet traffic.
How do we distinguish between actions from a “bot” and a human?
Every time someone scans a Flowcode or clicks a Short URL, their device sends an HTTP request. We review the request headers to learn about the source. The User Agent is a short line of text in the header that works like a digital ID, sharing details such as device type and browser. Our system also leverages Cloudflare’s bot detection pipeline to assign a bot score or grouping. Together with other header information and basic behavior signals, it helps us tell human activity from automated tools so we can keep your reports as accurate as possible.
How do Short URLs Impact Bot Traffic in Email?
When you include a Short URL in an email, the recipient's email service provider (ESP) often performs an automated action: it clicks or "fetches" the link to check for malicious content (like phishing or viruses) or to pre-load the content. This proactive security or optimization check by the ESP is an automated process, not a genuine visitor interaction. In other words, this is considered a bot and will be appropriately removed from your analytics.
Have more questions about this feature? Connect with us at [email protected].