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Advice and answers from the ClickCease team

Intro to Lead Shield

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Note: Lead Shield currently integrates with HubSpot forms. Additional platforms are coming soon - stay tuned!

What is Lead Shield?

Lead Shield protects your HubSpot forms — demo requests, registrations, and lead -gen forms — by evaluating every submission in real time. It analyzes both the visitor and the information they enter to determine whether a submission is genuine or comes from a bot or fraudulent user. Each one is then allowed, denied, or flagged based on ClickCease's detection engine and the signal settings you configure.

With Lead Shield, you keep fake and bot submissions out of your CRM, get clear benign, suspicious, and malicious verdicts on every entry, and let your team focus follow-up on genuine inquiries.

Please note: Lead Shield supports standard HubSpot forms only (i.e. not pop-up forms or non-HubSpot forms).

Capabilities

  • Email validation
  • Phone number validation
  • Bot and automation detection
  • Signal management — enable or disable individual detection signals

Why Do I Need to Use Lead Shield?

Every day, bots, fake users, and bad actors flood web forms with fabricated submissions. They inflate your lead counts, waste your reps' time chasing junk, exploit gated content and demo requests, and even hijack calendar slots meant for real prospects.

Lead Shield evaluates every submission in real time — checking device, network, behavioral, and identity signals — to separate genuine leads from bad actors before they ever reach your CRM. And it protects more than sales efficiency: by keeping fake or non-consenting contacts out of your outreach, it also safeguards your email sender reputation, your marketing spend, and your privacy compliance.

In short, Lead Shield makes sure every lead your team acts on is real — protecting your funnel, your reputation, and your bottom line.

How Does It Work?

Form Protection

→ You choose which forms on your site need Lead Shield

→ The moment someone submits a protected form, Lead Shield checks the submission in real time.

→ Each submission gets a clear recommendation — Accept genuine visitors, Challenge suspicious ones, and Deny malicious ones — along with the reason behind the verdict, so you always know why a decision was made.

Form Validation and Response Process

Every time someone fills out a protected form, Lead Shield instantly reviews who they are and the contact details they entered, then returns a clear verdict and a recommended action.

The following fields are automatically populated on each form submission:

  • cq_verdict - CHEQ's detection verdict on the form fillers' input - Malicious, Suspicious or Benign
  • cq_action - The recommended action based on the detection response - Deny (detected as Malicious), Challenge (detected as Suspicious) or Acceptet (detected as Valid).
  • cq_threat_type - A numeric code indicating the threat type identified. If more than one is found, this shows the most severe.

If you have any questions about this process, feel free to reach out to our 24/7 chat support.