How CrawlPact researches and maintains product comparisons

Last substantive update: 3 October 2026. This page covers comparisons only; how a CrawlPact audit works is on theaudit methodology page.

Why CrawlPact publishes comparisons

People evaluating CrawlPact usually already use, or are considering, a tool that works on a different layer: an edge firewall, a bot-analytics service, an AI-visibility tracker or a licensing platform. Those products are often described with the same words — "AI bots", "crawler control", "visibility" — even though they measure or do different things. Compare exists to make those boundaries explicit, including where another product does something CrawlPact does not.

Scope

• A product is compared only when buyers plausibly weigh it against, or alongside, a crawler-policy audit. Each comparison owns one search intent; we do not publish near-identical pages that swap competitor names.
• Every comparison separates five layers: declared policy (what a site publishes),observed traffic (what arrived), enforcement (what happens to a request), AI-answer visibility (how AI answers describe a brand) andlicensing or monetization (the terms of access).
• Within declared policy, CrawlPact itself distinguishes the declared policy, the response it observed, and actual crawler behaviour — which no public audit can prove.

Sources and evidence

Claims about another product follow this order of preference:

1. the vendor's current official documentation;
2. the vendor's current product pages;
3. the vendor's changelog or announcements;
4. the vendor's official code repositories;
5. the vendor's current pricing pages;
6. independent sources, only where no primary source exists — and labelled as such.

Other comparison sites are never treated as evidence. Every comparison lists its sources, the publisher, the date each was re-read and the claims it supports. A capability is described as present only when a current source establishes it; when the documentation we reviewed does not, the page says "not verified" — which never means the product lacks it — or leaves the claim out.

Documented capabilities, not hands-on tests

CrawlPact does not hold accounts with the products it compares, so Compare pages areevidence-based comparisons of documented capabilities. They do not describe private dashboards, unpublished behaviour or test results we did not obtain, and they never imply first-hand use. If a future comparison includes our own testing, it will say exactly what was tested, when, and how.

Pricing, plans and features

Plans and features change faster than editorial pages. Comparisons describe plan availability only where the vendor documents it, mark beta or plan-limited features as such, and avoid quoting prices, which go stale quickly. Always confirm current terms with the vendor.

No ratings, scores, winners or pay-to-rank

• No star ratings, numeric scores, "best" labels or declared winners — and no review or rating markup.
• Guidance is conditional: choose CrawlPact when…, choose the other product when…,use both when…
• Every comparison includes what the other product does that CrawlPact does not.
• No vendor can pay for inclusion, placement or wording, and Compare pages carry no affiliate or referral links.
• CrawlPact publishes these pages and is one of the products compared; each page says so.

Dates and updates

• Facts verified is the date every competitor claim was last re-read against its source. Re-checking without changing the page updates only this date.
• Published and Updated (the article's datePublished anddateModified, and the sitemap lastmod) change only when the page's content changes substantively — never because the site was rebuilt.
• Sources are re-read at least every 90 days, and whenever a vendor announces a relevant change. A material change to a product updates the comparison and its dates.

Corrections

If a comparison misstates a product — including CrawlPact — report it through CrawlPact'scorrections process, ideally with a link to the vendor's current documentation. Vendors are welcome to use the same route. Verified errors are corrected, and the correction updates the page's dates.

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