All URL shorteners are very different in their way of clicks tracking: what clicks they count, and what clicks they remove.

Both real users and internet bots can visit your pages, but it should not be counted as a unique click or a manual visit. Many sites and search engines use spidering as a way of providing up-to-date information.

We do tracking of bot/spider traffic in our statistics. Short.io identifies whether it is a user’s click or a bot’s one. It is based on some differences on how they present and share data to and from our servers. You can see it in the statistics of the link. All human clicks are in the “Human” section.

In doing so, we can eliminate spider/bot traffic from our click counters and provide the statistics with the utmost accuracy. Every click you see on Short.io dashboard was made by a human.