Limits of the method

Vercatus is designed to be quotable to a board. That means being precise about what each number is.

A sample is a sample. Findings scoped to a template or the site hold for pages outside the sample; page-level findings do not. A 500-page run on a million-URL site is a statement about templates and access posture, not an inventory audit.

A user-agent probe is not the real crawler. Requests carry a vendor’s published user agent from Vercatus’s network. A refusal proves the site refuses that identity from that origin. Sites that verify crawlers by IP or reverse DNS will treat genuine traffic differently. Confirm against WAF and bot-management logs before acting on an access finding.

The simulation is a model. It reproduces the shape of a retrieval pipeline over the site’s own passages. Real engines add ranking, freshness and source-credibility signals it does not have. Coverage verdicts are predictions of citability, not observations of it. The citation panel (roadmap) measures the real engines.

Lab timings are indicative. LCP, CLS and TTFB come from single headless-browser loads from one location. Confirm with field data before prioritising performance work.

Hypotheses have grades. A finding grounded in a grade-A source (official documentation) and one grounded in grade-C industry data are not equally certain, and the report shows the grade. Entries marked reported were supplied second-hand and never located at source; agents are instructed not to quote their figures.

The knowledge base has a date. Every entry carries a revalidation date. The field changes quarterly; so does the base.