Gmail's click spike is the new normal.

The four findings in our 2026 report have not changed. The one that kept generating questions was Gmail and its spike in NHI clicks. We can now answer with certainty - the jump is permanent.

• The jump was sudden and network-wide. In the week of 21 February 2026, Gmail's non-human click share jumped from a steady ~5-6% baseline to about 21%. It was not gradual, but a single week jump, across senders and campaigns - all at once.
• It has now held for six months. Every week since has sat between about 20% and 26%, with no drift back toward the old baseline. Half a year in, this is a permanent step change, not a transient spike.
• It is just clicks, not opens. Gmail's bot-open share stayed around 52% the whole time. Its long-standing Apple-MPP-era level. This is not an MPP artifact; it is a new, click-specific behavior consistent with automated, provider-side link fetching rather than a change in how people interact with emails.
• What it means for your Gmail numbers? Roughly one in four recorded Gmail clicks is now automated, and it is not going away. Gmail click-through rates, engagement segments, click-based send-time optimization, and any click-triggered automation are affected. Treat that ~20-25% as a standing baseline - and ideally filter it out - rather than reading it as rising human engagement.

Gmail: non-human share of clicks vs. opens

B2C campaigns · consumer Gmail · weekly, 3-week moving average · Nov 2025 - Aug 2026

The rest of the July-August picture

• Meta's crawler flooded newsletter archives to a 2026 high. The archive and republishing domains that inflate engagement numbers received nine times more automated clicks in August than in July. About 97% of them were bots and almost all from Meta's link crawler. As always, these are filtered out of the Gmail and consumer figures above.
• Other consumer inboxes held steady. Microsoft's consumer mailboxes stayed around 38% bot; Apple iCloud (~3%) and Yahoo (~1.5%) stayed low and flat. No new provider showed any increase.
• Corporate scanning stayed near-total. Behind security gateways, corporate link scanning ran at its usual ~98% bot through the summer. Our Bot Detection API click stream held around 50% bot - both unchanged.