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: arrived from somewhere plausible, moved through pages at human speed, and touched the page.
Machinery we can put a name to
- A search engine
- A crawler belonging to a search engine, identified by what it says it is and, where the operator publishes them, by the addresses it came from.
- An AI crawler
- A crawler belonging to an AI company — for gathering training material, for answering somebody's question, or on behalf of a person using an assistant.
- A known service
- A crawler or tool that identifies itself and is neither a search engine nor an AI company — a link previewer, an SEO tool, a feed reader.
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
- Systematically working through your pages, and either not saying who it is or saying something nothing supports.
- Copying your pages
- Working through your content far faster and far more completely than anybody reads it, and doing nothing else.
- An uptime check
- The same page, over and over, at regular intervals. Usually something you or somebody you work with set up.
- 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.
- Fake traffic
- Activity aimed at your analytics rather than at your website — visits that were never really visits.
When there isn't enough to go on
- Too little to go on
- The visit was too short, or too little of it was observed, to say anything honest about it.
- Not recognised
- 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
- Several independent things point the same way.
- Strong signs
- A lot points the same way and little points against it.
- Confirmed
- The operator publishes the network addresses its crawler uses, the visit came from one of them, and that address proves the name back. 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.