Not all traffic is good traffic. Scrapers, spam bots, and malicious crawlers can inflate your click statistics, waste bandwidth, and even scrape your redirect destinations. Here is how to protect your redirects.

The Bot Problem

Studies show that 40-50% of all internet traffic comes from bots. While some bots are useful (Googlebot, Bingbot), many are not. Bad bots can:

• Inflate your analytics with fake clicks
• Scrape your redirect targets to steal content or affiliate links
• Overload your redirect server with automated requests
• Follow your redirects to spam or attack your target sites

LinkVice Bot Blocking

LinkVice offers two layers of bot protection:

1. JavaScript-Based Redirect (Bot Filter)

When enabled, visitors receive an HTML page with a JavaScript redirect instead of a direct server-side redirect. Real browsers execute the JavaScript instantly — the redirect is seamless. Bots without JavaScript support cannot follow the redirect.

Whitelisted bots (search engines, AI crawlers, social media) still receive direct server-side redirects so your SEO and social sharing are not affected.

2. Blacklist System

Block specific traffic globally with three types of rules:

• IP Addresses — Block single IPs, CIDR ranges (10.0.0.0/8), or wildcards (192.168.*)
• User-Agent Patterns — Block by bot name (AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, MJ12bot)
• URI Patterns — Block specific paths (/wp-admin, /xmlrpc.php)

Default Bot Whitelist

LinkVice whitelists 40+ known good bots by default, including:

• Search engines: Googlebot, Bingbot, YandexBot, DuckDuckBot, Applebot, SeznamBot
• AI crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CohereAI
• Social media: FacebookExternalHit, TwitterBot, LinkedInBot, DiscordBot, SlackBot

You can customize this whitelist per redirect — add or remove bots as needed.

Monitoring Blocked Traffic

LinkVice analytics show you exactly how your traffic breaks down:

• Redirected — Direct server-side redirects (real traffic + whitelisted bots)
• JS Page — Visitors who received the JavaScript redirect page
• Blocked — Traffic blocked by blacklist rules (403 response)

Protect your redirects for free →