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Vercatus

The knowledge base

Vercatus does not apply a checklist. It retrieves applicable hypotheses from a knowledge base and reasons with them. Each entry records:

  • the claim, in one paragraph;
  • a grade — A: official documentation or standard · B: peer-reviewed or large controlled study · C: reputable industry data or observational · D: practitioner consensus;
  • its sources, with year;
  • an effect estimate, direction and size;
  • applies when — the site conditions under which it holds (informational, e-commerce, multilingual, CDN behind Cloudflare …);
  • the engines it concerns;
  • a revalidate date, because this field changes quarterly;
  • a status — verified (sources located and figures checked) or reported (supplied second-hand and not yet located). Agents are instructed never to quote a reported figure as fact.

The base holds 137 entries across search-engine documentation, IETF and W3C standards (RFC 9421 Web Bot Auth, RFC 9309 robots, the AI-preferences work, TDMRep), retrieval research (hybrid retrieval, lost-in- the-middle, chunking, reranking), generative-engine research (GEO, AI Overview audits), agentic commerce protocols, spam policies, and dated 2025–2026 industry measurements of AI-search behaviour.

Every finding names the entries it rests on, and the grades appear beside them in the report. You can browse the whole base in the workspace under Knowledge base.