BotWitness, a mechanical mite with an orange lens BotWitness

Proof of what the web told AI crawlers

Check any domain

Type one in below. You will get what its robots.txt says about each AI crawler today, the SHA-256 of the capture, and the date we first recorded it. Nothing to sign up for.

1,013,075
Domains tracked
21%
Block GPTBot
20%
Block ClaudeBot
2026-07-09
Recording since

One real record, not an illustration

On 14 August 2026 our crawler asked nytimes.com for its robots.txt and kept every byte that came back. Line 214 of the 344 it returned said this about OpenAI's crawler.

nytimes.com/robots.txt, lines 213 to 216

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ImagesiftBot

The record of that capture

Captured2026-08-14T07:54:35Z
SHA-256b5f9c7cc9b86d4d1…
RFC-3161 tokenpresent
Merkle rootddd685185095a29f…
Crawlers blocked20

In the last thirty days, 98,721 tracked domains rewrote their robots.txt. Each of those edits carries the same hash, the same timestamp and the same nightly digest as the capture above. That is the part nobody can go back and collect afterwards.

The same record, as an exhibit

A Certificate of Capture turns one archived fetch into a dated document you can hand to somebody else. This is the certificate for the record above, produced by the same code that runs when a customer buys one, from the same row in the archive.

Page one of a Certificate of Capture for nytimes.com, stating that
             on 14 August 2026 its robots.txt blocked GPTBot at the site root.

It names the domain and the crawler, states what the file said on that date, and prints the SHA-256, the capture time and the timestamp status underneath. The captured content follows on page two.

Download it and check the hash yourself against the record above. If the two disagree, we have a problem and you should not buy anything from us.

Download this certificate, 10 KB PDF

An archive and a set of probes

The archive proves what a site said. The probes test what the models kept. Holding both is the only reason we can answer the question anybody actually asks.

A swarm of small machine insects colliding with a chain-link fence.

What the archive holds

Daily captures of robots.txt and llms.txt across more than a million domains, plus EU disclosure pages, MCP manifests, agent key directories and model licences. None of it can be reconstructed later. Somebody has to write it down on the day, and that somebody should have nothing riding on the answer.

A gloved hand bringing a rubber date stamp down onto a stack of paper.

What the probes test

Four methods, each labelled by what it can and cannot show. Verbatim reproduction and recognition of your exact wording are facts about how a model behaves. A membership statistic is a relative signal, and we will not dress it up as a probability, because no honest one exists. When a model refuses to answer, the refusal goes in the report too.

What we sell

Dated, hash-verifiable answers about what the rules said at a given moment, and honest tests of what the models retained. Whichever side of the argument you are on.

Certificate of Capture

$49

A signed exhibit stating what a site told a crawler on a date, with the hash, the timestamp status and the captured content.

Buy one

Monitoring

from $49/mo

Watched domains, signed change alerts, unlimited history, and every report on this page unmetered.

See plans

Compliance audit

$199

Send your server log. We judge every AI-crawler hit against the robots.txt that was live at that exact moment. We never keep the log.

How it works

Crawl attestation

with Monitoring

For AI companies. What robots.txt permitted your crawler, across your crawl list, over any range. Drawn from a record you do not control.

How it works

Opt-Out Efficacy Report

$499

You opted out on a date. We prove when, then test the models released since and show what they still reproduce of your text.

The flagship

Exposure Report

$299

Reproduction and recognition probes across the flagship models, plus a membership signal we label as relative and leave that way.

What is in it

Evidence package

per matter

For litigators. Raw captures, timestamp tokens, Merkle proofs and a verifier, so the other side can check it without trusting us.

For counsel

Defensive audit

from $5k

For AI labs. Find out what your model reproduces before opposing counsel does it for you.

Run it on us

Other things we photocopy daily

The same recorder archives what the rest of the AI industry publishes and then quietly edits. Looking is free.

StreamWhat we keepGo
EU AI Act What each general-purpose AI provider disclosed about its training content under Article 53(1)(d), revision by revision, including the days it published nothing at all. Enforcement started on 2 August 2026. Disclosures
MCP Daily sweeps of the registry and live tool manifests from remote servers. What a tool claimed to be on the day an agent trusted it. Manifests
Web Bot Auth Daily snapshots of the signing-key directories run by the major agent operators. Keys rotate, and yesterday disappears unless somebody kept it. Keys
Hugging Face Whether a model was public, under which licence, on which date. Deletions, gatings and licence edits become dated events. Models
RSL Really Simple Licensing terms declared in robots.txt across the tracked web, captured as served from the day a site first declares one. Adoption

What it costs

Lookups, the live report and the streams cost nothing. Everything else sits on one page with the price next to it.

An open card catalogue drawer packed with index cards, one card raised.

One-time reports run from $49 to $499. You pay once and keep the PDF. Monitoring starts at $49 a month and unmeters every report on this page. Evidence packages, defensive audits and enterprise access are quoted per matter, because the scope is different every time.

Everything, on one page