Click

A click is one recorded request to a short link. It is counted by the redirect service at the moment it answers with a destination, not by the page that loads afterwards — so a click can exist with no page view behind it, because the visitor cancelled, lost signal or closed the tab while the destination was still loading.

For the same reason a click is not a person. Messenger previews and mail scanners fetch links before anybody sees them, one impatient visitor produces several events in a row, and traffic arrives from data centres nobody invited. Useful reporting keeps those apart: the raw total, the unique count and the share classified as automated are three different facts about one link.

Expect the total to disagree with the analytics on your own site, and do not read the gap as a defect. The two systems count different moments — an answered request against a rendered page — and every drop-off in between lives inside that difference.