"Unknown bot" is not an answer: describing automated traffic that has no name
Many automated visits to a website never introduce themselves. Here is how we now describe them in plain words — by kind, never by guesswork about who sent them.
Expert insights on AI traffic, content monetization, and GDPR compliance for publishers.
Many automated visits to a website never introduce themselves. Here is how we now describe them in plain words — by kind, never by guesswork about who sent them.
A crawler-control recommendation that only lists the bots already in your logs is incomplete by design. Here is why we recommend an explicit rule for every AI crawler we track — including the ones that have not visited yet.
Before any control of ours starts rejecting requests, we prove in a log-only mode that it is complete, that it actually fires, and that it never trips legitimate traffic.
Two changes make your traffic intelligence more trustworthy: traffic over your plan limit is still measured instead of going dark, and geography is read from the real visitor rather than the delivery edge.
Our compliance log that tracks account changes now stores only hashed identifiers. The change advances GDPR Article 5(1)(c) data minimization without compromising row-continuity needed for Polish 5-year tax retention obligations.
Before any destructive change to our compliance trail database, an automated verification pass confirms the operation will not lose audit-trail integrity. The pattern caught a real divergence this session and prevented data loss.
When privacy notices, marketing pages, PDF DPAs, and the live service all reference the same retention periods and processing limits, drift between them is a real misleading-claim risk. Here is how HumanKey closes that class of drift mechanically.
When you exercise GDPR Art. 17, your email is now removed from team-invite and admin-action records held by other accounts.
How invitation, acceptance, and member removal events on your team are recorded in your account activity log — supporting GDPR Art. 15 Right of Access.
An update on what you see in your dashboard when you switch into a team account you manage — the sites, plan, traffic, and snippets all reflect the same context together.
An update on the in-dashboard step that lets customers switch from monthly to yearly billing, with the prorated charge and the new renewal date shown before they confirm.
An update on the explicit-acceptance step we apply when inviting people to HumanKey workspaces. Invitees see the inviter's name, when one is set, and the proposed role before accepting — acceptance is an explicit click, not an automatic action.
When plan tiers and feature gates spread across many code paths, drift is inevitable — unless you mechanically enforce a single source of truth. Here's how HumanKey closes that class of bug across our customer-facing surfaces.
Three analytics tools, three different visitor counts on the same site. We explain what each one measures, why the gap between them is structural, and which number to use for which decision.
An operator-side update on the review pattern we use to keep our customer-facing surfaces consistent. We publish the methodology — not the findings — and explain why.
What we learned after 90 days of running an AI-transparency banner under EU AI Act Article 50: what we measured, where the wording was harder than the engineering, and what we'd change.