Bot Filtering & Protection
How Short10 keeps crawlers and link previewers out of your click counts, and how to choose between filtering, blocking or counting them.
Why bots show up at all
Every time you paste a link into Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, LinkedIn or an email client, that service fetches the link to build a preview. Search engines, uptime monitors and security scanners do the same. Without filtering, a single share can look like several clicks.
Automatic detection
Short10 identifies these requests by user agent and request behaviour and marks them as bots. Bot clicks never appear in your main analytics or in unique-visitor counts. They are listed separately on the Bot Analytics page so you can see how much of your traffic they represent per link.
Choosing a mode
Go to Settings → Bot filter mode and pick one:
| Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Filter (default) | Bots are redirected normally but recorded only in Bot Analytics. Previews keep working. |
| Block | Identified bots are not redirected to the destination. Use when you must protect a destination from scanners; note that link previews will stop rendering. |
| Off | Everything is counted as a normal click. Only for debugging. |
Webhooks and exports
Click webhooks include an is_bot flag so your own systems can decide what to do; CSV analytics exports exclude bot rows.