How to Use Clearout Form Guard to Block Fake Sign-Ups

The short answer: if bots or throwaway addresses are filling your demo or newsletter form, Clearout's Form Guard stops them at the field for 2 credits per field it checks, so a form taking 1,000 sign-ups a month with only the email checked uses 2,000 credits, inside the 3,000 of the Starter plan at $23 a month (pricing page, monthly billing, checked on 26 October 2026). The steps: create a guard, choose the email rules, set the timeout, limits and allowed pages, paste the snippet into the page or Tag Manager, test with the free test addresses, have an agent check a strict rule against last month's real sign-ups, then read the blocked and lost leads every week.

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A fake sign-up costs twice: once when sales spends time on it, and again when the next newsletter bounces off it. What Clearout includes and costs is in the Clearout glossary entry.

Before the snippet goes live:

1. Price the fields, not the form. The pricing guide charges 2 credits per name, email or phone field validated, and nothing for unknown results. For example, a form checking all three spends 3 x 2 = 6 credits per submission, so 1,000 submissions a month need 6,000 credits: more than Starter's 3,000, inside Pro 10K at $58 a month on monthly billing.
2. Count what already got through. Export last month's form submissions from your CRM and mark the obvious fakes by hand. That share is your baseline, and the export is the sample for step 6.
3. Know where you will read the result. Form Guard Analytics reports forms submitted, fields validated, submissions blocked with the block rate, submissions allowed and average fill time, per the analytics docs. Those five figures are how you judge the setup.

What you need

• A Clearout account; new accounts start with 100 free credits.
• Access to the page's HTML head, a WordPress header plugin or Google Tag Manager, and to the Content Security Policy if your site sends one.
• For step 6, an assistant that supports MCP, such as Claude.

Step 1: Create the guard

Open Form Guard in the Clearout app and click Create Guard, as the Form Guard overview shows. Name it after the form it protects, such as "Demo request, pricing page", since the name is how credit use and activity are split later, then pick the fields to validate.

Step 2: Choose the email rules

The email field docs offer four presets and a custom set:

• Accept any valid email (the default): allows any working mailbox, role and gibberish addresses included, and blocks disposable ones. Right for a newsletter.
• Business and personal only: also blocks role and gibberish addresses.
• Business only: blocks Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and other free providers, plus role accounts. Right for a B2B demo form, if your buyers use work addresses.
• Safe To Send only: allows only addresses with a valid mailbox on a domain that is not catch-all, role or disposable.
• Custom: each of those as a toggle, plus blocks on unknown results, catch-all domains, timeouts and a crossed usage limit.

Start one notch looser than you think you need: a rule that blocks a real buyer costs more than a fake that gets through.

Step 3: Set the advanced settings

The advanced settings docs recommend first-time users accept the defaults, then adjust:

• Timeout: 10 seconds by default; if validation takes longer, the input is accepted and the form submits.
• Mode: AJAX checks each field as the visitor leaves it; FormSubmit checks everything on submit, which means fewer validations and fewer credits.
• Limit usage: caps validations per IP and in total. When the cap is crossed, checks stop and submissions still go through, unless you switched on blocking at the limit in step 2.
• Form URLs: list the pages allowed to call the guard; requests from anywhere else are rejected, which keeps your credits from being spent on someone else's site.
• Bot detection: Clearout's own method by default, or Google reCAPTCHA v3 with a score threshold that starts at 0.5.

Step 4: Install the snippet

The wizard generates a JavaScript snippet. Paste it inside the head tag of the page, or just before the closing body tag. On WordPress, a header and footer plugin such as WPCode keeps it in place through theme updates. With Google Tag Manager, create a Custom HTML tag, paste the snippet and fire it on the form pages. If your site sends a Content Security Policy, add https://clearout.io to script-src and img-src and https://api.clearout.io to connect-src, as the overview lists.

Step 5: Test without spending credits

The email field docs point to a set of test addresses that trigger each result at no credit cost. Submit the form with them: one that should pass, one disposable, one free-provider address if you chose business only. Watch the message under the field. If it shows nothing, reload the page: the advanced settings docs ask you to reload every page carrying the guard after a change, so the new settings load.

Step 6: Let an agent test a strict rule on real sign-ups first

Before you switch a live form to business only, find out who that rule would have turned away. Add Clearout's hosted MCP server, https://mcp.clearout.io/mcp, to Claude as a custom connector and sign in. Give it the sample from your CRM export of genuine sign-ups, a couple of hundred rows, and ask it to verify each address and report how many come back as free, role, disposable or catch-all, with examples.

Each verified address costs 1 credit, so a sample of 200 costs at most 200. The agent counts; a person reads the examples and decides. If a third of last quarter's real customers signed up with a free address, the business-only rule is the wrong rule for that form, however many bots it would stop.

Step 7: Read blocked and lost leads every week

In the Form Guard list, click View Analytics, laid out in the analytics docs. Top Reasons ranks why submissions were blocked; Form Forensics shows why one particular submission was blocked or allowed. Lost Leads lists visitors who entered a valid email or phone but were blocked on another field or left the form, and it keeps them for a rolling 30 days only, so export the CSV each week.

If a real lead was blocked, the analytics docs point you back to the advanced settings. If you want to follow up a lead who abandoned the form, check your legal basis first: under Article 13 of the ePrivacy Directive, marketing email to people in the EU generally needs their prior consent, and a half-filled form is not that.

How to know it worked

Compare next month's share of fakes in the CRM with your baseline, then read the block rate and average fill time in Form Guard Analytics: instant fills on one page point at bots, long ones at a confusing form.

What the docs warn about

• Credits draining too fast. The Form Guard FAQ suggests usage limits, the hooks for custom checks, FormSubmit mode and a sensible timeout.
• Forms that load late. If the form appears after the page, set the event that triggers form discovery.
• Strict content policies. Without the three directives, the script does not load and nothing is checked.

One thing to weigh on the free tier. Until you move to a paid plan, the Form Guard FAQ says your form carries Clearout's "Powered By" branding, so every visitor who fills in the free version of your sign-up form also sees the vendor's name; decide whether that suits the form before you leave it running.

FAQ

Does Form Guard need a developer?

No. The Form Guard FAQ calls it a no-code setup: the snippet goes into the page header, and every rule is set in the dashboard.

What happens to submissions when credits run out?

By default, checks stop and the form keeps submitting. The email field docs include an option to block submissions once the usage limit is crossed instead.

Can one guard protect several forms?

Yes, as long as their field names differ, per the FAQ; still, one guard per form keeps the analytics readable.