Contact cookies and email link clicks

I’m seeing conflicting messages in articles on here and in the main Help section.

Some places say that a cookie is created on the user machine if a link in a campaign email is clicked.

Others that the cookie is only created if an Infusionsoft form is completed and submitted.

Which is it?

Experimenting, what seesm to happen is that no cookies are set by clicking the email link. Cookies are set by displaying (not completing or submitting) an Infisionsoft form on a web page. Looks like it runs the IS script when the page loads.

So I guess I could just create dummy web forms and hide them on the pages I want to use for web page automation?