What each verdict means
Every visit that has finished gets one of these. They are deliberately narrow: naming a company on the strength of a guess is exactly what this product is meant not to do.
People
- A person
- Behaved like somebody reading: the page held them for a while, they scrolled, they clicked or typed — and nothing pointing the other way outweighed it.
Machinery we can put a name to
- A search engine's crawler
- A crawler belonging to a search engine, confirmed by the addresses the operator publishes or by the name its address answers to. One that only says it belongs to a search engine reads as a crawler.
- An AI crawler
- A crawler belonging to an AI company and confirmed by it the same way — for gathering training material, for answering somebody's question, or for building AI search results.
- A known service
- A crawler whose operator confirms it and that is neither a search engine nor an AI company — a link previewer, an advertising checker, a site-testing tool.
- An uptime check
- A monitoring service whose operator confirms it is theirs — the kind of check you, or somebody you work with, set up.
Machinery we can't
- Says it's an AI crawler
- Claims to be an AI crawler but nothing corroborates it. Kept apart from the one above on purpose: anybody can write a name into a user agent.
- An automated browser
- A real browser being driven by a program rather than by a person.
- A crawler
- Announces itself as a crawler — by a name we know but the operator does not confirm, by a name we don't know, or as a confirmed crawler that archives the web or audits links rather than indexing it.
- Copying your pages
- Worked through many pages in one visit without running a script or reading any of them, or announced itself as a tool built for copying whole websites.
- Probing for a way in
- Asking for addresses that have never existed on your site — configuration files, administrator pages, backups.
- Something automated
- Not a person, and not identifiable as anything in particular. The signs point to a program; what program is not knowable from here.
When there isn't enough to go on
- Too little to go on
- Nothing observed about the visit bore on the question at all.
- Couldn't tell
- Enough was seen to judge, and the evidence does not point anywhere. This is an answer, not a gap.
How strong the evidence is
Every verdict carries one of these. Never a percentage — see below for why.
- Nothing to go on
- Nothing was observed that bears on the question.
- Slight signs
- One or two things point this way, and any of them could have an innocent explanation.
- Some signs
- One weighty thing, or a few smaller ones, point the same way — or more did, but something pointed the other way and held the verdict back.
- Strong signs
- A lot points the same way and little points against it.
- Confirmed
- The operator vouches for the address the visit came from: either it is in the address list the operator publishes, or it answers to a name in the operator's own domain that points back at it. This is the only kind of identity we call confirmed, and behaviour alone never reaches it.
Why not a percentage
To turn a judgement into a probability you need traffic somebody has already labelled by hand, in volume, to check it against. Nobody has that for the open web. A number printed without it looks like a measurement and is an opinion wearing one — so this product will not print one.
Where the evidence disagrees with itself, both sides are kept and shown to you. Discarding the inconvenient half is how a confident wrong answer gets made.
