Opens are holding. Clicks are falling. But before you rebuild your entire newsletter strategy, it’s worth asking a harder question: do you actually know what your click rate is measuring?
If you run newsletters for a media or publishing brand, you’ve probably watched the same thing happen. Opens look fine. Clicks keep drifting down. And somewhere in a quarterly review, someone asks: what are we doing wrong?
So teams start rebuilding. New subject-line formulas. Fresh templates. A harder look at the content itself. All reasonable instincts — but they all assume the number on the dashboard is telling you the truth. And in 2026, for most publishers, it isn’t. Your click rate is being pulled in three directions at once, and unless you can tell them apart, you’re optimizing against a moving target you can’t actually see.
Here’s what the data really says — and why the honest version of the story is more fixable than the panicked one.
The trend is real — here’s what the data shows
Across newsletter sends from media publishers on our platform, open rates have held remarkably steady over the past couple of years — bouncing around a healthy 32–35% band without any dramatic slide. Click rates are a different story. Unique click rate fell from about 2.36% in January 2024 to roughly 1.60% by March 2026 — close to a 32% decline in a little over two years. Click-to-open followed it down, off around a quarter over the same window.
If you only look at that, the conclusion: readers are disengaging, and the content must be the problem. But opens holding steady while clicks fall is a strange signature. The same people are still opening at the same rate — they’re just registering as clicking less. That gap is the first clue that something other than reader behavior is moving the number.
Part of the drop is bots leaving — and that’s a good thing
Some of what looked like “clicks” for years was never a person at all.
Automated activity — security scanners, link-checkers, and outright bots — clicks the links in your emails without ever being a reader. It inflates your click counts while leaving your opens untouched, which is exactly the divergence the data shows. When we look at the ratio of total clicks to unique clicks (a rough tell for the same “reader” clicking over and over, a classic bot signature), it climbed steadily through 2024 and into early 2025, peaking around 1.78×. Then it started falling — down to roughly 1.55× by March 2026, the lowest point in the dataset.
What changed is that more publishers turned on advanced clickbot suppression. In one comparison window, that suppression stripped out about 7% of raw weekly click activity — nearly five million clicks over a single 13-week stretch — that basic filtering had been letting through. Put differently: publishers without advanced suppression were counting clicks at nearly double the rate of those with it enabled. Same audiences. Same content. Wildly different numbers, entirely because of what was being counted.
So a meaningful chunk of the “decline” isn’t decline at all. It’s your click rate getting more accurate. The number didn’t just fall — it got honest.
And part of it is a genuine shift in how people read
That’s not the whole story, though, and it would be convenient — but wrong — to blame it all on bots.
Real reader behavior is changing too. More people are consuming a newsletter inside the inbox rather than clicking out to a site: skimming the summary, reading the excerpt, getting what they came for without ever leaving Gmail or Apple Mail. In an inbox increasingly shaped by AI-generated summaries and previews, more of the value gets delivered before a click is ever on the table.
This isn’t just something we see in our own data. beehiiv, reporting from a large, consumer-heavy newsletter base, saw its click rate fall from 4.74% in 2024 to 3.23% in 2025 — about a 32% drop — even with its own bot filtering in place. They attribute it directly to inbox competition and readers engaging in-newsletter instead of clicking through. When two very different platforms see the same directional move, it’s a signal about the medium, not a quirk of one dataset. Clicking out is simply becoming a smaller part of how engaged readers behave.
Why you can’t fix what you can’t separate
Here’s the trap. Bot suppression and behavioral change push your click rate the same direction — down — but they mean opposite things. One is your data getting cleaner. The other is your audience’s habits genuinely shifting. And without advanced suppression in place, you can’t tell how much of your decline is which.
That blindness has a cost, and it’s not abstract. It’s the creative team rewriting a campaign that was actually working fine. It’s a content strategy pivot aimed at a problem that was mostly measurement noise. And it’s the hardest conversation of all — the one with an advertiser — where you’re reporting click numbers you can’t fully vouch for, or walking back numbers you reported last year. When you can separate the signal from the noise, that same conversation flips: you get to be the publisher who understands what’s actually happening in the inbox, and prices the value accordingly.
The metric that still tells you the truth: click-to-open
If clicks are noisy and opens are inflated by privacy features, what do you trust?
Click-to-open rate — the share of people who opened and then clicked — is the steadiest, most honest signal you have. It isolates the audience that actually showed up: of the people who opened, how many found something worth acting on? It’s harder for bots to distort, and it speaks directly to whether your content is landing with real readers. When your CTOR holds while your list grows, that’s healthy growth. When it slips, that’s your earliest, cleanest warning that something in the content or the audience match needs attention — usually well before opens or unsubscribes show it. If you’re going to manage your newsletter by one number, make it this one.
One more thing the averages hide: who your audience actually is
There’s a final distortion baked into most benchmarks, and it has nothing to do with bots: the blended average. A single “newsletter click rate” lumps together audiences that behave nothing alike.
In our Q2 2026 data, consumer media senders in our client base outran B2B publishers by roughly 2.47× on click rate and 1.98× on click-to-open — and that gap has been widening quarter over quarter. It makes intuitive sense: enthusiast and consumer readers opt into topics they love and read on their own time, while B2B newsletters land in the middle of a busy workday. Neither is “better.” But if you’re a B2B publisher benchmarking yourself against a consumer-inflated average, you’ll conclude you’re failing when you’re actually right on pace. Judge yourself against the segment you actually compete in — not a number built mostly from audiences unlike yours.
What to do with all this
A few things worth taking back to your team:
Stop reacting to the click rate in isolation. Before you overhaul content or design, ask what’s actually moving the number — cleaner measurement, shifting reader habits, or a real content gap. They call for completely different responses.
Make click-to-open your north star. It’s the metric most resistant to the noise, and the one that tells you whether real readers are engaging.
Get your measurement honest first. You can’t diagnose a decline you can’t decompose. Advanced clickbot suppression isn’t about a prettier dashboard — it’s about being able to trust your own numbers enough to act on them, and to defend them to the partners who pay for your audience.
Benchmark against your own segment and your own trend. The direction of travel in your numbers, read against publishers like you, will always tell you more than a single industry average.
Falling click rates aren’t necessarily a sign your newsletter is losing its audience. Often they’re a sign the number is finally telling the truth. The publishers who’ll pull ahead aren’t the ones chasing the metric back up — they’re the ones who understand what it’s really measuring, and make sharper decisions because of it.
Want to see how much of your own click activity is real — and how your numbers compare against the segment you actually compete in? Talk to an Expert →
Further reading: the full Newsletter Statistics for Media & Publishing (2026) benchmarks, and our data on bot clicks in email.
