About
The reader changed. The tools did not.
For twenty years, being found meant ranking on a results page a person would scan. Now a growing share of your audience asks a question and reads an answer assembled by a machine — one that had to reach your page, understand it, and decide it was worth citing. Every tool we could find still audits the results page.
Vercatus started as a question a publisher asked in 2026: when an engine answers for us, what does it find? Nobody could say. Not because the answer was hard, but because nobody had built the instrument — a retrieval engine over the site's own content, run as every machine identity that matters, judged against the questions the site exists to answer.
That instrument is the product: a machine visibility intelligence platform, measuring what we callmachine readership — reach, understanding and citability, as numbers that repeat. Everything else — the workspace, the reports, the board brief — exists so that what it measures turns into decisions.
How we work
Four commitments
Evidence, graded
Every finding rests on hypotheses in a knowledge base where each entry carries its sources, a grade from official documentation down to practitioner consensus, and a date by which it must be re-checked. When the evidence is weak, the finding says so.
Identity, not evasion
Our crawler signs every request with a published key, honours robots.txt and Content-Signal, and backs off when asked. We test whether machines can reach you by asking as they would — never by pretending to be a person.
Templates, not pages
A site is a few dozen templates rendering a million pages. Findings name the template, the share of pages affected, and the control group. A number that moves is measured against pages you did not touch.
Say what is not built
The security page lists what is in place and what is not. The product page lists what is next. We would rather lose a deal than a security review.
Talk to us
Design partners, publishers with a portfolio, security teams with questions — one address.
Crawler questions and abuse reports: the crawler page · abuse@vercatus.com