You pasted a short link in a group chat. The card appeared fifty times. Your dashboard barely moved. That is not a bug.
When your earnings depend on views, the honesty of those views is the product. Here is what we count, what we drop, and why.
What a view is
Someone clicks kool.ink/CODE, we record it, they see a short interstitial, then they go to your destination. One human trip through that path is one view.
The interstitial is five seconds. Preview bots skip it so Slack and Discord can still unfurl the link. Those preview hits never hit your balance.
What we throw away
Crawlers and monitors. Googlebot, Bingbot, uptime checkers, security scanners, headless tools that announce themselves. User-agent and related signals. They do not pay you and they do not count toward 10,000.
Link previews. Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack, Facebook, X: they fetch the URL to draw a card. That is not a person deciding to open your link. Instant redirect for them, zero earnings.
Repeat hammers. Rapid clicks from the same network get collapsed. One person (or a whole office behind one NAT) cannot mint views by refreshing. The first clean hit can count. The rest in that burst do not.
Guest links. Shorten without an account and the redirect still works. Nothing accrues. Earnings need a signed-in publisher.
We would rather under-count than pay for noise. If bots counted, the flat $3.50 would have to shrink to cover the waste.
What still counts
A person on a phone or laptop who actually clicked. New visitor or returning visitor, as long as it is not the same network slamming refresh. Any country. Any device.
We do not pay more for a US desktop click than for a phone in Manila. That is the point of the flat rate.
Why publishers argue with this
If you paste a short link in a big group chat, you will see preview traffic in server logs and almost none of it in KooLink. That is working as designed. The people who tap through are the views.
If you test your own link twenty times, the counter will barely move. Also working as designed.
If a competitor's dashboard is racing ahead of ours on the same URL, ask them what they count. A lot of "high CPM" products count the preview.
How this ties to payouts
The 10,000 unique views gate uses the same filter. You cannot farm the threshold with bots or a refresh loop. Unique here means distinct legitimate views across your links, not 10,000 different countries.
Estimated earnings on the dashboard use only valid views, at $3.50 per 1,000. Same rules after you are approved.
What you should do
Share the link where a human has a reason to tap it: a video description, a channel post, a newsletter, a blog. Do not buy bots. Do not wrap the same URL five times. Do not ask a group to "click for me."
If a view looks missing and it was a real person, contact us. Bring the short code and an approximate time. We can look. We will not add preview crawlers back in.
More on the money: how much you can earn. More on the gate: your first 10,000 views.