Real Clicks Only
Numbers that count people, not crawlers.
Short links attract a lot of automated traffic. SEO crawlers, preview fetchers, security scanners, and scrapers all follow links, and most link shorteners count every one of them as a click. That inflates your totals and quietly distorts every breakdown built on top of them.
FIFO classifies each click before it counts. Automated traffic is identified and separated, so the numbers on your dashboard are the ones you would actually act on.
What you get
- Crawlers and scrapers excluded from click counts
- A real-versus-automated split shown in your stats
- Bot traffic never consumes your plan allowance
- Attribution measured against real visitors only
Why bot traffic ruins attribution
Automated clients almost never send a referrer. When they are counted as clicks, they pile up in the "unknown" bucket and drown out the real traffic you can attribute — a handful of genuine referrals ends up looking like a rounding error against a total that was never real.
Filtering automated traffic first is what makes the rest of your analytics meaningful. Every percentage in FIFO is measured against real clicks, so a referring site that accounts for a third of your genuine traffic is shown as a third, not as a fraction of an inflated denominator.
Detection you can see
Automated clicks are not silently discarded. FIFO records the classification and shows you the split, so you can see how much of the traffic reaching your links is real and how much is machinery. If a link is attracting an unusual amount of automated attention, that is worth knowing rather than hiding.
Detection combines the signals a redirect can read. Self-identifying crawlers and scripted HTTP clients are caught from the request itself, and so is traffic arriving from a cloud provider under a browser-shaped identity — FIFO matches the address against the ranges the major hosts publish and announce, so a scraper renting a server is recognised before the click is ever counted. A slower reverse-DNS pass runs afterwards as a backstop for anything the ranges miss.
Bots do not spend your allowance
Because automated clicks are excluded from your monthly usage, crawler traffic cannot push you toward a plan limit or trigger an upgrade you did not need. You pay for the audience you reach, not for the internet indexing you.
Perfect for
- Trusting your click totals when reporting to a brand partner
- Understanding how much crawler traffic your links attract
- Comparing channels without automated noise in the numbers
- Making sure plan usage reflects real audience activity
Frequently asked questions
- How does FIFO know a click is automated?
- Self-identifying crawlers, SEO tools, and scripted HTTP clients are recognised from the request at click time, as is traffic arriving from a cloud provider’s published address ranges — which is how most scrapers reach you, since renting a server is cheaper than a home connection. A reverse-DNS pass runs afterwards to catch anything the ranges miss. Anything that does not match a known automation signature is counted as a real visitor.
- Do bot clicks count toward my plan limits?
- No. Automated clicks are recorded for the traffic breakdown but never counted toward your monthly click allowance, and never added to a link’s click total.
- Can I see how much of my traffic is automated?
- Yes. Your traffic sources page shows real clicks and automated clicks side by side, so you always know what share of the traffic reaching your links is genuine.
- Could a real visitor be mistaken for a bot?
- Detection is deliberately conservative: a click is only classified as automated when it matches a known automation signature. When a request is ambiguous, FIFO counts it as a real visitor, because under-counting bots is a smaller problem than discarding a genuine click.