Utkarsh Karale
Utkarsh Karale Utkarsh Karale
2 min read Debugging, Google Chat, Webhooks, Java

The Day Google Chat Clicked My Button Before I Did

A debugging journey of discovering how Google Chat link previews trigger webhook URLs before users even click them.

Introduction: Recently, while working on a project that sends dynamic links to Google Chat, I ran into a really strange bug — one that had me scratching my head for hours. Every time I sent a link, it would automatically trigger multiple times before the user even clicked it!

Here’s how I found the root cause and fixed it.

🧩 The Problem

In my project, I send a “Retry” or “Approval” link to users through Google Chat using a webhook. The idea is simple — users click the link to perform an action (like retrying a failed job or approving a request).

But strangely, the links were getting triggered 5–6 times automatically, even though the users hadn’t clicked them yet.

🔍 Debugging Journey

I checked:

  • My retry logic — ✅ fine
  • Webhook code — ✅ fine
  • Network logs — ✅ fine
  • Server retries — ✅ none

Still, every time I sent the message, the link was hit multiple times. That’s when I realized — something else was calling the URL before the user.

💡 The Discovery

While checking server logs, I noticed the User-Agent header looked like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-Chat; +https://chat.google.com/)

That’s when it hit me — Google Chat automatically fetches link previews to show the thumbnail/summary inside the chat message.

So technically, it wasn’t the user clicking the link. It was Google Chat doing a preview fetch — and that was triggering my logic.

🛠️ The Fix

Simple but effective — I just added a condition to ignore requests from Google Chat’s user agent.

String userAgent = request.getHeader("User-Agent");
if (userAgent != null && userAgent.contains("Google-Chat")) {
 // Skip execution for preview requests
 return ResponseEntity.ok("Preview ignored");
}
// normal execution logic
processUserAction();

With that small change, everything worked perfectly — no more auto retries or auto approvals!

🎯 The Takeaway

Sometimes the smallest things, like link previews, can cause the biggest confusion. Always check the User-Agent when debugging unexpected API calls — it might not be your code at all!

💬 Closing Thought

Debugging isn’t just about fixing errors — it’s about understanding why something behaves unexpectedly. And sometimes, the culprit is a helpful feature that’s too helpful 😄

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