Somebody has to be
accountable for the numbers.

Desvela publishes a monthly census of what the top 100,000 domains expose to AI agents. Numbers like that are only worth anything if you can find out who produced them, how, and what they had to gain. This page is that.

The operator

Desvela is an independent project, run by one person from Barcelona, Spain. It is not a company. There is no legal entity called Desvela, no investors, no venture funding, and nobody else on the payroll, because there is no payroll.

It is self-funded and cheap to run, on the order of fifteen dollars a month: a small server, two domains, and prepaid credit with the AI providers. That is the whole cost base. Nothing here is subsidised by anyone whose ranking we might be tempted to improve.

Where the data actually lives

Every piece of live project data sits in a single PostgreSQL database on one server in Falkenstein, Germany: the crawl index, the census, Registry Watch subscriptions, census email subscribers, and the usage telemetry. One machine, in the EU, run from Spain.

This is a narrower and more useful claim than "we are European", so it is the one we make. The websites themselves are served from a global edge network, and the sentence "nothing leaves the EU" would not be true. Here is everyone who touches anything, including the inconvenient entries.

What gets recorded, precisely

Not a slogan, a list. There is no analytics product on this site: no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no PostHog, no tracking pixels, no cookies for measurement.

• No third-party requests. Loading a page here contacts nobody but us. No fonts, no CDNs, no embedded anything.
• What we do record. When you use the checker, we store the domain you checked and your browser's user-agent string. When you click a call to action, we store which one. That is it, and it is what lets us publish honest usage numbers instead of made-up ones.
• IP addresses. We do not put IP addresses in the database. The checker's abuse limiter hashes your IP with a random salt that is regenerated every time the service restarts, and never writes it down. Our hosting providers keep their own server logs, as every hosting provider does.
• No accounts. The census, the checker and the registry need no sign-up. Two things are opt-in and do involve an address you give us: the monthly census email, and Registry Watch. Both are one-click unsubscribe. Buying Brand Watch needs an Apify account, because it is sold on their store.
• Subscribing takes two steps on purpose. Anyone can type any address into a form, so we send a confirmation link and nothing else is ever sent until someone clicks it from that inbox. An address that is never confirmed is deleted after 30 days.
• Never sold. No data about you or your domain is sold or shared for advertising.

How the index stays neutral

The index is not tied to any vendor ecosystem. It crawls the Tranco top 100,000 regardless of who runs those domains, it follows the open ARD specification, and no position in it can be bought. There is no paid ranking, no sponsored placement, and no allowlist.

Where that neutrality has a limit, it is here: the one paid product, AI Brand Watch, is distributed exclusively through the Apify store. So the index is vendor-neutral, and the distribution of the paid product is not. Those are different sentences and we keep them different.

Check the claims

Most of the above is verifiable without taking our word for it.

• registry.desvela.dev/metrics.json publishes our own usage numbers, live, with the zeros in. At the time of writing that includes zero active Registry Watch subscriptions, zero census subscribers, and zero users of the paid actor in the last thirty days. It also flags when most of our search traffic is automated crawlers rather than people, because counting those as demand would be wrong.
• registry.desvela.dev/status reports what is running and how fresh the index is.
• The bot policy names our crawler's user-agents, exactly which four public files it reads, its rate, and how to have your domain excluded within 48 hours.
• The census methodology documents how the numbers are produced, including where they are weaker than they look.

Contact

One address, read by the person who runs it: hello@desvela.ai. Corrections to the census are welcome and get published as corrections, not quietly edited.