📧Half your clicks aren't human

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👋 Hey!

Picture your last sponsor report. The click rate looked great, the advertiser seemed happy, everyone moved on. (Yay!) Now here is the uncomfortable part: according to new ESP data, roughly half of those consumer clicks came from machines. (Nay?) For B2B lists, it is closer to three-quarters. Your best-performing link of the year might have been a security scanner doing its job.

The good news is that the same week the bots got exposed, the humans got new places to gather. beehiiv launched Community so your readers can finally talk to each other, Google started showing which searches lead to your social posts, and Ghost shipped a switch that makes your archive legible to AI assistants.

This week: how to build engagement no bot can fake, a Hollywood newsletter that grew into a $20 million company, and a pricing page tweak worth a 42% lift.

Ready to count the real humans? Let's dive in! 👇

beehiiv turned your newsletter into a town square. At its first Summer Release event, CEO Tyler Denk unveiled Community: free or paid member spaces that sync your posts and podcasts in real time, wrapped in your branding.

More than half of your email clicks are not human. ESP Omnivery says bots now generate about half of consumer clicks and roughly three-quarters of B2B ones. Read your A/B tests and sponsor reports with fresh suspicion.

Kit finally lets you swap in your own favicon. One of its most requested features: your landing pages and newsletter site now carry your icon in the browser tab. Find it under Settings > Brand on paid plans.

Google Search Console now tracks your social and video posts. New platform properties reveal which search terms send people to your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube content. Mine those queries for your next issue topics.

Comcast is beta testing daily deliverability report cards. The proposed APRF standard sends aggregated JSON reports showing where your mail landed and how readers engaged. Google co-authored the spec, so broader adoption looks likely.

Speaking of town squares: we just opened ours.

Every Tuesday, this email talks at you. Now there is a place where you can talk back, and to each other. Ask the deliverability question you have been sitting on, share what your last subject line test taught you, and steal what is working from operators a few steps ahead of you.

We’ll post playbooks and breakdowns in there that never make it into the newsletter. Membership is free, and the whole point is simple: grow, learn, and execute together.

Join the HeyNews Community here.

Hand AI a map of your archive

How: If you publish on Ghost, open Settings → Metadata and flip on the new GEO tools. Ghost will serve an llms.txt file at the root of your domain, a concise index of everything you have published, and a clean Markdown version of any post when you append .md to its URL. Only public content is included; paid posts show just their title and excerpt. Not on Ghost? Check whether your platform can serve llms.txt, or generate one and host it yourself. Then ask ChatGPT or Claude a question your archive answers, and see if you get cited.

Why: AI assistants answer questions by searching the web and citing sources, but they choke on bloated HTML full of scripts, navigation, and cookie banners. A clean Markdown index tells them exactly what you cover and where to find it, which raises your odds of being the source that gets quoted. Ghost's announcement frames it as SEO's successor: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization.

Expected Result: Your back catalog starts working a second shift inside AI answers. Watch your analytics for referral traffic from AI assistants over the next month, and note which posts get surfaced. Those are the topics worth doubling down on.

Spotlight: The Ankler by Richard Rushfield

What works:

Creator quote: "I was an Ankler addict first," Min said, drawn in by a subscriber list stacked with entertainment power players.

Your takeaway: Build undeniable authority in one niche before you productize. The paid tier, the ad business, the events, and the spinoff titles all rest on readers who could not get Rushfield's coverage anywhere else.

Read the full case study.

mailX: find out why your emails hit spam, in plain English

Why You'll Love It: mailX audits your SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI records in real time, scans your domain and IP against the major blacklists, and checks your MX and SMTP setup in one combined report. Every error comes with a plain-English fix, so you can repair your sender reputation without paging an engineer.

Best For: Newsletter operators troubleshooting a sudden deliverability dip, and agencies that need fast domain diagnostics across multiple clients.

Test: Buttondown moved its "Starting from scratch?" callout inside the pricing calculator and replaced a pale ghost button outside it with a primary button inside, where over 20% of new customers importing lists had been hitting a dead end.

Result: Completed registrations rose from 6.7% to 9.5%, a 42% relative lift, on a 50/50 split of visitors.

Takeaway: Put your main CTA where people are already interacting. Audit your own subscribe page and pricing page for elements that look like dead ends, test the fix on half your traffic, and measure completed signups rather than clicks. The bots inflate clicks; they do not finish registration forms.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri