Is Keap Tracking Your Email? How to Block It

You open a follow up email from a small business you bought from once, a landscaper, a gym, a local marketing agency, and somewhere on a server, a dashboard just logged the exact second you did it. That business almost certainly did not build the tracking system itself. There is a good chance it came bundled into Keap, the small business CRM and marketing automation platform formerly known as Infusionsoft, which Thryv bought for 80 million dollars in a deal that closed in October 2024. Is Keap tracking your email? Yes, through the same pixel and link rewriting mechanics used across the marketing automation industry, and here is exactly how it works and how to block it in Gmail.

Key Takeaways

• Keap, formerly Infusionsoft, became part of Thryv in an 80 million dollar acquisition that closed on October 31, 2024, and Keap's help documentation now lives on Thryv's support site rather than the original help.keap.com domain.
• Keap places its email open tracking pixel at the bottom of the message, so per Keap's own documentation an open only registers once a recipient's email client renders that far into the message or clicks a link inside it.
• If a recipient has automatic image loading turned off, Keap's own documentation confirms the open event never gets recorded, the same weakness every pixel based tracker shares.
• Keap's click tracking distinguishes button types: buttons that open a website or trigger a file download get logged as clicks, while buttons that only send an email or dial a phone number do not.
• Gblock blocks Keap's tracking pixel and strips its tracking links before they load inside Gmail, the same way it already blocks tracking from HubSpot, Pipedrive, and the other CRM platforms covered in this series.

What Is Keap, and Why Would It Email You?

Keap is a customer relationship management and marketing automation platform built for small businesses, the kind of tool a solo coach, a local gym, a landscaping company, or a small e commerce shop uses to send invoices, follow up sequences, and newsletters without hiring a full marketing team. It started under the name Infusionsoft, rebranded to Keap in 2019, and in October 2024 became part of Thryv. Per Thryv's announcement of the acquisition close, the deal was worth 80 million dollars in cash, and the combined company now serves more than 100,000 SaaS subscribers across Thryv's and Keap's customer bases.

One visible sign of that transition: Keap's old help center at help.keap.com now redirects to Thryv's support site rather than hosting its own documentation directly, a small but concrete marker of how thoroughly the two companies have merged their operations. If you have ever bought from a small local business that sends automated follow up emails, invoices, or promotions, there is a real chance those messages moved through Keap's Campaign Builder or Broadcast tool rather than a generic mail server.

Does Keap Track When You Open an Email?

Yes. Keap email tracking works through the same basic mechanic as most marketing platforms, an invisible pixel embedded in the message that quietly reports back the moment your email client renders it. Per Keap's own documentation on delivery rate versus open rate, Keap places its tracking pixel at the bottom of the email rather than at the top, which means the reader's client generally has to load or scroll through the full message for the open to register, a small design choice that ties Keap's open counts a bit closer to genuine reading than platforms that plant the pixel at the very top of the message.

The same documentation confirms that Keap counts an open when either that pixel loads or when the recipient clicks a link inside the email, whichever happens first. It also states plainly that if a recipient has automatic image loading turned off in their email program, the open never gets logged at all. That single admission is the whole reason a pixel blocker works: Keap cannot tell the difference between an email you never opened and one you opened with images blocked, because both produce identical silence on its end.

How Does Keap's Click Tracking Work?

Every link Keap sends that points to an external destination gets wrapped so the platform can log the click before forwarding you along, the same rewriting pattern used across nearly every cold email and marketing automation tool. Keap also runs bot detection to filter out clicks generated by security scanners and link crawling tools rather than real people, so a sender's click reports are not inflated by automated systems opening links on a recipient's behalf before a human ever sees the message.

There is a granular distinction worth knowing if you build or read Keap emails closely. Buttons configured with a "Send Email" or "Call Phone Number" action are not logged as clicks in Keap's reporting, because neither triggers a trackable web request. Buttons set to "Open Website" or "File Download" are counted, since both involve a direct URL that Keap can rewrite and monitor. It is a small implementation detail, but it means the click count on a Keap powered email undercounts total engagement by design, not by accident, since only the URL based actions leave a trace Keap can capture.

Does Gmail Change How Accurately Keap Tracks You?

If you read Keap powered emails in Gmail specifically, there is an extra layer worth understanding. Since December 2013, Gmail has routed every embedded image, tracking pixels included, through its own proxy servers rather than fetching them directly from the sender. Per Litmus's reporting on Gmail's image caching change, Google's servers cache each image after the first request, which means a Keap pixel can fire once when Gmail's own systems first process the message, sometimes before you have actually opened it, and typically will not fire again on repeat views because the cached copy loads instead.

None of this makes Keap's tracking meaningless, it just means an open logged against a Gmail address is not a literal proof that a human read the message at that exact moment. What it does mean is that the pixel is still there, still sending a request tied to your address, and still worth blocking before it ever gets the chance to fire, regardless of how Gmail's caching complicates the timing on the sender's side.

Why Email Users Should Care

Keap is not doing anything illegal or unusual here. It is a legitimate business tool doing exactly what the small businesses paying for it asked it to do, which is precisely why antivirus software and spam filters walk right past it. Nothing about an invoice reminder or a newsletter from a shop you bought from once looks malicious, because it is not. It is a real business you interacted with, logging when you open its emails and which links you click, then feeding that into a dashboard someone checks later that day.

That gap between legitimate and invisible to you is the whole reason a dedicated blocker matters. You cannot opt out of Keap's tracking directly, because you likely never signed up for Keap at all, you signed up for the business using it underneath. Our guide to blocking email tracking in Gmail covers why this invisible tracking behaves differently from the phishing and malware threats most security tools catch, and why Gmail's own settings only get you partway there.

How Do You Block Keap Email Tracking in Gmail?

A few approaches work, each with real tradeoffs.

Disable automatic image loading. In Gmail, go to Settings, then General, then Images, and choose "Ask before displaying external images." This stops most tracking pixels, including Keap's, but it also hides every legitimate image in every other email until you approve it one at a time, which gets tedious fast.

Hover before you click. Hovering over a link in a Keap powered email reveals the rewritten tracking domain in your browser's status bar before you click, though it does nothing to stop the open pixel from firing the moment the email renders.

Switch to a client with built in protection. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection preloads every image regardless of whether you open it, defeating open tracking but not click tracking. Proton Mail and HEY both proxy or block remote images by default, though switching your primary email client is a bigger step than most people want just to stop one platform's pixel.

Use a dedicated blocker built for Gmail. Extensions like Ugly Email and PixelBlock were early, genuinely useful tools for flagging tracked emails, but both rely on static domain lists that struggle to keep up as platforms like Keap roll out new tracking infrastructure. Trocker works across several webmail providers at once, which trades some Gmail specific depth for broader coverage. Gblock runs inside Gmail and blocks tracking pixel requests before they load, including the infrastructure Keap relies on, without hiding legitimate images. Its blocklist updates automatically instead of shipping as a fixed, manually maintained list, and it strips known tracking parameters from links themselves rather than only flagging the pixel after the fact.

The Bottom Line

Keap runs the same playbook already documented across this series in HubSpot's and Pipedrive's outbound tools: a pixel that logs the moment you open a message, and a rewritten link that logs the moment you click one. What makes Keap notable right now is timing. It is mid transition from Infusionsoft's original branding into Thryv's broader platform, the kind of moment when the underlying tracking mechanics rarely change even as the company name above them does. Block the pixel and the link rewriting these platforms share, and it stops mattering which name is on the sender line or which parent company owns it this year.