Classify
Separate ordinary readers, directional referral signals, training agents, index crawlers and live user agents.
System, end to end
A commercial test with every boundary visible.
CrawlClick keeps serving truth, money truth and outcome evidence separate. That separation prevents a successful insertion from being reported as a successful answer-engine outcome.
Product evidence map
What we can prove—and what the pilot must learn
No illustrative traffic claims
- 01 / built
Verified request
Identify the crawler from vendor-backed network evidence, not a forgeable user-agent alone.
- 02 / built
Disclosed insertion
Bind the reviewed claim, destination, price and publisher to a traceable event.
- 03 / built
Money movement
Prepay, settle balanced books, and make publisher payouts through Stripe Connect.
- 04 / validating
Answer surfacing
Measure whether an engine carries the sourced, disclosed claim into an answer. No outcome is guaranteed.
Request path
What happens when someone requests a publisher page?
Verify
Require network evidence for billable crawler traffic. A user-agent or human navigation header alone cannot become a charge.
Fetch
Resolve the verified public origin once, connect over TLS and preserve safe origin semantics.
Decide
For an eligible verified crawler, match reviewed and funded campaigns against page context and safety policy.
Disclose
Insert one visibly sponsored passage and durably record it. Human and ineligible requests receive the unchanged origin response.
Data plane
Why does serving avoid Postgres?
Crawler traffic can be enormous and bursty. Eligibility, targeting and pacing therefore read immutable object-storage snapshots. The relational control plane is never a dependency of a request hot path.
Control plane
Where does commercial state live?
Postgres owns identities, organisations, sessions, verified sites, Stripe objects, the operation outbox and balanced ledger. Tokens are stored only as hashes and every tenant query is organisation-scoped.
How does failure behave?
Origin problem
Unsafe, private or malformed origins are rejected during setup instead of discovered on a live crawl.
CrawlClick problem
The Cloudflare edge fails open to the publisher's real page, preserving availability.
Money problem
Stripe events and operations are idempotent and retryable; ambiguous state cannot silently credit or pay twice.
Invite-only pilot
Help answer the commercial question.
We are selecting a small set of US publishers and advertisers for a test-mode-first pilot. Every request is reviewed by a person.