Beyond bots —
catch the fraud they miss.
User-agent blocking catches crawlers. It doesn't catch a click farm cycling through real browsers, a competitor hammering your ad link to burn your budget, or a VPN exit node masking a repeat visitor. Truthylink checks every click the moment it happens — before it's ever counted as real traffic, not in a report you read after the money's already spent.
Four signals, checked on every click
No single signal is reliable alone — so every click is checked against all four before it counts.
Repeat-click flagging
The same /24 IP subnet clicking a link again within an hour is flagged as a repeat — not counted as a fresh visitor. Subnet-level matching catches VPN users and shared networks that present different exact IPs across requests.
Burst-pattern flagging
5+ clicks from the same /24 subnet on one link within an hour is a click-farm signature — unnaturally consistent pacing that organic traffic doesn't produce.
VPN, proxy & datacenter detection
When an IP reputation key is configured, every click's IP is classified as residential, mobile, hosting, VPN, or Tor. Datacenter and proxy traffic is flagged separately from organic clicks.
Tor exit-node detection
Tor traffic is a small share of clicks but worth isolating — a campaign link receiving repeated Tor-originated hits is unusual and flagged as its own category.
Full visibility into what's filtered
Fraudulent clicks are recorded for audit purposes but excluded from your reported analytics — and you can see exactly why each one was flagged. No combined "fraud score" standing in for the evidence — every number here traces back to one of the four checks above, so you can verify it, not just trust it.
Clean click rate
visible per linkIllustrative example — actual numbers depend on your link's traffic.
Who else offers this?
We checked 13 link shorteners. Here's what we found.
| Platform | Click fraud detection | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Truthylink | Included, all plans | Free |
| Linkly | Similar detection, paywalled | $15/mo+ |
| Bitly, Short.io, Rebrandly, Dub.co, TinyURL | Bot filtering only, no fraud layer | — |
Based on Truthylink's competitor audit, June–July 2026. Pricing and features change — verify directly with each vendor.
Running paid ads? Timing is the real difference.
Dedicated ad-fraud blockers like ClickCease exclude a bad IP from your campaigns after a delay — by default, up to 24 hours — and offer help filing a refund claim for spend already lost in that window. Truthylink checks the click at the moment it happens, so a repeat-clicker or click-farm burst is flagged before it's ever counted, not after the money's gone.
Trust your numbers.
Every click, verified.
50 free links. No credit card. Fraud detection on every single one from day one.