How to filter spam form submissions with AI
Open forms attract spam. Learn how AI can automatically flag low quality and irrelevant submissions so you can focus on real users.
Introduction
If you have ever put a contact form on a public page, you know what happens next: offers for SEO services, random link building pitches, and generic copy-paste messages that have nothing to do with your product.
You can add CAPTCHAs and basic validation, but some spam still gets through. Over time, this noise makes it harder to see real messages from real users. AI can help by automatically flagging submissions that look like spam.
Why spam filtering matters
Spam in your form submissions is more than a small annoyance:
- It wastes your time and mental energy
- It clutters your support or contact inbox
- It can distort your analytics if you count submissions
Ideally, you want to focus on real users and route or hide obvious spam automatically.
How AI spam detection works for forms
Instead of relying only on field validation or simple keyword rules, an AI model can look at the content of the message and decide:
"Does this look like a legitimate message about this product, or is it generic spam?"
For example:
- "Hi, I would like to move my existing forms to your backend."
- "We offer 10,000 backlinks per month, guaranteed ranking."
- "Your pricing page is confusing, can you explain the limits?"
- "Earn money fast!!! Work from home!!!"
AI can flag the link building and "earn money fast" messages as spam, while keeping product questions and migration requests as normal submissions.
Spam classification in DropForm
DropForm uses AI to enrich each submission with a category field, which can be:
- LEAD
- BUG
- FEEDBACK
- SPAM
- OTHER
When category = SPAM, you can:
- Hide these submissions by default in your main view
- Send them into a separate "Spam" filter instead of your primary inbox
- Exclude them from analytics and reports
- Optionally, delete or ignore them automatically in your own tools
Example spam submission JSON
Here is an example of what a spammy submission might look like once DropForm AI has classified it:
Because spam is just another category, you do not need a separate system for it. You simply treat category = SPAM differently in your UI or automations.
Practical filtering strategies
Once you have AI spam classification, you can implement simple rules like:
- Do not send email notifications for
category = SPAM - Only show non-spam submissions in your main dashboard
- Store spam separately with shorter retention, or not at all
The key is that your team no longer has to read every low quality message. They can focus on actual users instead.
Example: ignoring spam in a webhook handler
Because DropForm includes AI fields in webhooks, you can choose to ignore spam completely in your own backend. Here is a simplified example:
This pattern lets you preserve spam if you want to review it, or skip it entirely for downstream systems.
Getting started
To start filtering spam with DropForm AI:
- Enable AI classification for the forms that are publicly exposed
- Send a few sample spammy messages and a few legitimate ones
- Confirm that obvious spam is classified as
category = SPAM - Adjust your views, email notifications, or webhooks to treat spam differently
Conclusion
Open forms are a powerful way to capture feedback, leads, and support requests - but they also invite spam. Instead of constantly cleaning up the mess manually, you can let AI do the first pass and separate irrelevant noise from real users.
DropForm's AI-powered form intelligence adds spam detection on top of your existing forms, so you can keep your current frontend while dramatically improving your signal-to-noise ratio.