Is Groove Email Tracking You? What Clari's Pixel Sees

A sales rep emails you on a Tuesday morning. You read it, do not reply, and forget about it. Forty minutes later your phone rings. Groove email tracking is why. Groove, sold since 2023 as Groove by Clari, is a sales engagement platform that lives inside Gmail and Outlook as a browser extension. Its documented behaviour is to embed an invisible image in outbound mail and rewrite the links so every click passes through a server first. The sender gets an open count, a timestamp and a live notification. You get nothing, because nothing in the message says any of it is there. What follows comes from Clari's own support articles and from checks we ran against the tracking host on 31 August 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Clari announced its acquisition of Groove on 14 August 2023, and Clari itself merged with Salesloft on 3 December 2025, so the pixel in a Groove email now belongs to the combined company.
• Clari's knowledge base states that a custom domain "personalizes your organization's tracking pixel and link tracking URL," and names branded.groove.co as the CNAME target customers point their own subdomain at.
• Groove requires open tracking to be switched on before link click tracking can be enabled, per Clari's product documentation, so a message with rewritten links is also carrying a pixel.
• Salesforce task records created by Groove carry Times Opened, Times Clicked, Last Opened Date and Replied fields, which means every open is written to a CRM record attached to your name.
• Requesting https://branded.groove.co/ on 31 August 2026 returned an HTTP 302 to engine.groove.clari.com, a CloudFront fronted host, showing the tracking path terminates on Clari infrastructure.

What Is Groove Email Tracking?

Groove email tracking is the feature of the Groove by Clari sales engagement platform that records when you open a message, how many times, which links you click, and whether you reply. It is not a separate product a rep buys. It is a checkbox in the Groove Chrome extension, and Clari's FAQ on setting open and link click tracking automatically turns it on for every message a rep will ever compose: "any new emails you compose from your inbox will be set to track by default."

Ownership matters more than usual here. Clari's press release, Clari to Acquire Groove, dates the announcement to 14 August 2023. Then Clari merged with Salesloft, its largest rival in sales engagement, in a deal that closed on 3 December 2025 under new chief executive Steve Cox. Follow that chain and you get a result nobody wrote a headline about: two of the three sales engagement tools most likely to be tracking your inbox, Groove and Salesloft, now sit inside one company.

What Does Groove Report to the Sender?

It reports that you opened the message, how many times, when you last opened it, which links you clicked, and whether you replied, surfaced to the rep in real time and written back to Salesforce. Clari's article on tracking emails for opens, clicks and replies describes desktop notifications, a badge count, a live activity feed at app.groove.co/emails and a per thread engagement summary. Clari's FAQ on tracking emails with Groove fills in the rest:

• An open count beside the subject line. Gmail shows the rep "a count beside the email subject" for each tracked message, so a second read is visible as a second read.
• A push notification the moment it happens. The extension carries "a red counter" of unread opens, clicks and replies, plus a Notification Hub showing "exactly who has been interacting with your tracked emails and when."
• A permanent CRM row. Salesforce task records carry Times Opened, Times Clicked, Last Opened Date and Replied. The open outlives the notification.

Now the honest limits. The pixel does not read your message, your drafts or your other mail. Everything above is inferred from a request leaving your device, and from when. That request carries an IP address and a user agent, so a rough location and a mail client ride along whether or not the dashboard shows them; Clari's documentation describes who and when rather than naming a location field. The numbers are softer than the interface suggests, too, because Apple's Mail Privacy Protection fetches remote content on arrival instead of on read, manufacturing opens that never happened. See our piece on fake email opens from Apple Mail.

How Do You Know If a Groove Email Is Tracking You?

Open the message in Gmail on desktop, click the three dot menu, choose Show original, and read the raw source for a one pixel image and for links whose destination does not match their text. Google documents that route in its guide to tracing an email with its full headers. Four things to look for:

• An image with no size. Search for width="1", height="1" or 1px. A pixel exists to be requested, not seen.
• A long opaque identifier. The image URL carries a random looking string identifying you and that specific send. Two recipients of one campaign get two different strings.
• Links that do not go where they say. Compare each href against its visible text. If the text reads like a calendar link but the destination is a tracking host with the real URL buried inside it, that is click tracking.
• A hostname shaped like groove.company.com. Clari documents that pattern for custom domain customers, so a subdomain starting with "groove" under the sender's own website is a strong tell.

One gap, stated plainly: we could not verify the default pixel hostname for a Groove account with no custom domain configured. Clari's documentation refers to "your organization's tracking pixel" without publishing the shared host, and we had no live Groove send to inspect. The pixel comes from Groove and Clari infrastructure; only your copy of the message can name the exact host. Our walkthrough on how to detect email tracking pixels in Gmail covers the general method for any vendor.

Why Does the Custom Domain Make Groove Harder to Spot?

Because a Groove customer can move the pixel and the link redirects onto a subdomain of its own website with one DNS record, after which nothing in the message points at Groove or Clari. Clari's article on configuring your custom domain says a custom domain "personalizes your organization's tracking pixel and link tracking URL to maximize email deliverability and reduce the chances of user messages being marked as SPAM," and gives the subdomain pattern groove.[your_custom_domain].com, pointed by CNAME at branded.groove.co.

We resolved that target on 31 August 2026. branded.groove.co is a CNAME to a Heroku space, secret-sea-9492.vast-mesa-1544.herokuspace.com, serving a Let's Encrypt certificate issued 8 July 2026 with exactly one name on it. An HTTPS request to the root returns HTTP 302 to engine.groove.clari.com, which sits behind CloudFront, and whose content security policy header names two hosts absent from any branding: assets.grooveapp.com and wss://notifications.grooveapp.com. The trail runs from the sender's own website, through a Groove edge host, to Clari.

The stated motive is deliverability, not concealment, and that is probably sincere. The effect is identical either way: the tracker inherits the sender's reputation, and any blocklist built from vendor hostnames goes stale the moment a customer files a CNAME. We have seen this architecture three times now, in Bananatag's custom domain targets, in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its exct.net hosts, and here. A static list of domains is the wrong primitive. What survives every rename is the shape: a one pixel image with an opaque identifier, and a link resolving somewhere other than its text claims.

Groove Already Suppresses Tracking, Just Not for You

Groove ships a blocklist that silently switches tracking off for certain recipients, and it protects the sender's colleagues rather than the person being emailed. Clari's FAQ on tracking emails with Groove states that "Groove uses a block list that automatically excludes anyone with the same domain as you," applying to both opens and link clicks, and that clicking your own link does not count.

Sit with that for a second. Per recipient suppression is a solved problem inside the product: a domain match, already written, already running on every send. The only question ever asked was who it should point at, and the answer was the sender's own staff, so internal forwards do not pollute the open rate. Nobody built the mirror image for the recipient, because the recipient is not the customer. That is the economics of email tracking compressed into one configuration setting.

Even Gmail has lost patience: Clari's December 2024 note on Gmail's spam update: what Groove customers need to know warns customers that Gmail began flagging messages containing tracking pixels, so recipients may see "Images in this message are hidden. This message might be suspicious or spam." When the largest mail provider on earth treats open tracking as a spam signal, the practice is no longer quietly normal.

How Do You Block Groove Email Tracking?

Stop remote images loading, which kills the open record, then deal separately with the rewritten links, because no image setting touches those. Start with what you have:

• Gmail on desktop. Settings, See all settings, Images, Ask before displaying external images, save. Google documents this under turning images on or off in Gmail. Gmail's default proxy is not this setting: it hides your IP address but still fetches the image, so the open lands anyway.
• Outlook. Trust Center, Automatic Download, block pictures in HTML email. On a managed laptop, Group Policy may set this the other way and your change will not survive.
• Apple Mail. Mail Privacy Protection hides your address but prefetches remote content, feeding the sender a false open rather than no open. It protects your location. It does not protect your silence.

Dedicated tools go further, each with a real edge. Ugly Email flags tracked messages with an eye icon, but it is a detector first, working from a list of known domains that a customer specific CNAME defeats. PixelBlock stops pixel loads in Gmail and tells you who tried, though it targets images rather than wrapped links. Trocker is open source and marks both, but runs on volunteer maintenance, slower than a company adding a subdomain. Proton Mail and HEY block remote content by default and name the senders they caught, which is strong, but both mean moving your mail.

Gblock is built for the two gaps in that table. It blocks tracking pixels from loading and strips tracking redirects out of links before you click, the half most pixel blockers leave open. Its blocklist updates on its own instead of waiting on a release, which is what matters when a tracking host moves with one DNS record, and it runs inside Gmail so your address and provider stay put. Stated straight: we have not inspected a live Groove send, and no extension undoes a policy pushed to a locked down work laptop. See also our comparison of how to block email tracking in Gmail and our roundup of the email tracker Chrome extensions doing the tracking in the first place.

What This Means for Your Inbox

A marketing pixel counts a crowd. Groove counts a person. That is why sales engagement tracking deserves a harder look than the newsletter tracking most people picture: every open binds to a named contact record in Salesforce, with a running total and a date of last read, beside your job title and phone number for as long as that CRM lives. Nobody aggregates you into a percentage. On scale, Englehardt, Han and Narayanan found in their PETS 2018 study of email tracking that 85 percent of the emails they collected carried embedded third party content, and roughly 30 percent leaked the recipient's address to a third party simply on being viewed.

For anyone with a compliance brief, the European position has firmed up. The European Data Protection Board adopted Guidelines 2/2023 on the technical scope of Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive in final form on 16 October 2024. It addresses email pixels by name, describing one as a resource whose "sole purpose is to establish a communication by the client to the host of the pixel," and it brings the consent rule into play independently of whether a cookie is set. A rep flipping a default checkbox in a Chrome extension is unlikely to have produced anything a regulator would recognise as consent.

You will not win the argument about whether vendors measure engagement. The narrower question you can answer is whether the request leaves your machine. Four steps: switch Gmail to ask before displaying external images; run Show original on the next sales email and search it for width="1"; check a link's destination before clicking, and copy the real URL out of the wrapper if you need it; install a blocker that handles the pixel and the link, not just the pixel. On the compliance side, add a fifth: ask your sales engagement vendor whether tracking is on by default, and whether your privacy notice says so.

Sources: Clari: Groove, Configuring your custom domain; Clari: Tracking Emails for Opens, Clicks and Replies; Clari Community: How do I track emails with Groove?; Clari Community: How do I set email open and link click tracking automatically?; Clari Community: Gmail's Spam Update, 4 December 2024; Clari Community: When Replies Go Missing; Clari: Clari to Acquire Groove, 14 August 2023; Salesloft: Clari and Salesloft Complete Merger, 3 December 2025; EDPB Guidelines 2/2023 on the technical scope of Art. 5(3) ePrivacy Directive; Englehardt, Han and Narayanan, I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking, PoPETs 2018; Google: Turn images on or off in Gmail; Google: Trace an email with its full headers; Apple: Use Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone. DNS, HTTP header and TLS certificate observations were made on 31 August 2026 and may change.