What is a dead click?

A dead click is a single click or tap after which nothing observable happens on the page: no navigation, no DOM change, no network request and no visual feedback within a short window.

Why it matters

Dead clicks are quieter than rage clicks but often more common. A user clicks a heading that looks like a link, a disabled button with no disabled styling, or a card whose click handler threw. They pause, wonder, and either try again, which becomes a rage click, or leave.

Detecting them automatically is harder than it sounds, because a click that legitimately does nothing, such as selecting text or dismissing focus, looks identical from the outside. Most tools that report dead clicks tune a heuristic and accept some noise.

How AnyReplay handles it

AnyReplay does not claim automatic dead-click detection today. The SDK flags rage clicks at record time and marks the chunk with hasRageClick; a dead click is what a reviewer looks for in the interaction list when a session shows a click followed by nothing. Because the recording is a DOM recording, the click and everything after it are stored as events rather than pixels, so a click with no change behind it stands out without a frame-by-frame scrub through video. If you review sessions in another language, session translation keeps the clicked label readable.