SearchSeal vs Known Agents
Known Agents, formerly Dark Visitors, tracks AI agents and bots visiting your site, maintains a large agent directory, and can generate and update your robots.txt automatically.
Known Agents and SearchSeal both record real AI agent traffic. The differences are in bot scope, access automation and how the evidence is used.
Known Agents measures
- Visits from AI agents, crawlers and scrapers, identified against a large agent directory
- Human referral traffic arriving from AI platforms
- Automatic robots.txt generation and updates as new bots appear
SearchSeal measures
- Real requests from AI crawlers to your site: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and others
- Which pages each crawler read, and the HTTP outcome of every request
- Whether robots.txt or your host is blocking a crawler
- Observed counts with labeled coverage. Unknown is shown as unknown, never as zero
Side by side
Data in
Known Agents
Infrastructure integrations, backend SDKs or REST API
SearchSeal
Cloudflare OAuth, or access logs from any host over HTTPS
Robots.txt
Known Agents
Generates and updates rules automatically
SearchSeal
Reports allow, partial or block verdicts. Never edits your files
LLM referral tracking
Known Agents
Yes
SearchSeal
No. SearchSeal tracks crawlers, not human referrals
Programmatic access
Known Agents
API
SearchSeal
REST API and MCP server
What a number means
Known Agents
Logged agent visits
SearchSeal
Observed counts with labeled coverage. Unknown is never shown as zero
When Known Agents fits
You want agent tracking plus automation: a robots.txt that keeps itself current, and referral numbers from AI platforms in the same place.
When SearchSeal fits
You want an evidence trail that stays observation-only, ingests plain access logs from any host, and is queryable by your own tools and AI agents over API or MCP.
Same question, different workflows. Pick the one you will actually use.
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