The Aethelforge Index · 24 Aug – 23 Sep 2026
Edition 001
No channel carried a declared agent. The reading layer surged to twenty-eight times its baseline the day after Meta shipped Muse.
Across twenty-five monitored sites, one live business line, twenty-seven chat tenants and fourteen form tenants, every channel could see crawlers and AI-referred people. None recorded an AI agent that declared itself while acting for someone. The adversarial layer still dominates the phone and a third of every contact form.
- Monitored sites25
- Chat tenants27
- Form tenants14
- Declared agents, any channel0
Four channels
What arrived, by layer.
Web · 272,361 bot hits
The reading layer, day by day.
- AI share of all bot traffic72.4%
- Meta-ExternalAgent119,94144.0% of every bot hit in the window
- Assistant fetches for a person10,926ChatGPT-User pattern; an assistant fetching a page because someone asked
- Nine-day surge, 9–17 September104,058peak 20,177 on 2026-09-16 against a pre-launch average of 725 a day
Breakdown
Every row, every count.
| Reading | AI crawlers and fetchersTraining crawlers, answer-engine index bots and on-demand fetchers, by declared user agent. | 197,101 |
| Reading | Search and SEO crawlersGooglebot, Bingbot, Applebot-style indexers and SEO tooling. | 33,985 |
| Reading | Social previewers | 2,302 |
| Unidentified | Other and unidentified bots | 38,973 |
| Agents | Declared agents (signed requests)Requests carrying a Web Bot Auth Signature-Agent header. | 0 |
| Automated | Robocalls and dead air | 63 |
| People | People, or too little to tell | 5 |
| Agents | AI agents calling for someone | 0 |
| Human proxy | People calling from an agent's brief | 0 |
| Adversarial share | 93% | |
| Declared agents | 0 |
| People | People, unflagged | 131 |
| Automated | Spam-flagged submissions | 56 |
| Reading | People referred by an AI answerArrived from chatgpt.com; the person submitted, the assistant only pointed. | 8 |
| Agents | Declared agents | 0 |
| Adversarial share | 29% | |
| AI-referred share | 4% |
| People | Sessions, week of 21 September | 155 |
| People | Sessions, week of 14 September | 128 |
| Agents | Sessions marked agent-driven | 0 |
| Tenants reporting | 27 | |
| Agent marker | 0 |
Method, this edition
Web figures come from the bot records the fleet middleware writes for every non-human request, aggregated per day across all monitored sites; on-demand assistant fetches are counted by their published user-agent patterns. Phone figures come from the receptionist's call log for the window. Form figures come from the lead store, using the spam flag and referrer recorded at submission. Chat figures come from the concierge's weekly analysis. Test traffic generated by the publisher is excluded. Numbers are aggregates only.
How every edition is builtNotes
- Meta documents Meta-ExternalAgent as its training and indexing crawler. The surge began on 9 September, one day after Muse launched on 8 September, and ended on 18 September. The correlation is tight; causation is plausible and not proven.
- Meta's on-demand fetcher pattern recorded no hits in the window, consistent with Amazon's public complaint that Muse browses without identifying itself.
- A declared agent on the web is a request that carries Web Bot Auth signature headers. None arrived on any monitored site in the window.
Editions
Numbered. Signed. Never revised.
FAQ
The Index, answered.
01How often is a new edition published?
Editions are published on fixed windows as the instruments accumulate data. Each one is numbered, carries its own window, and is signed at publication. A correction never edits an edition; it ships as a new one with a note.
02Why is the declared-agent count zero?
Because in this window no request on the web carried an agent signature, no caller identified itself as an assistant, no chat session declared one, and no form submission said so. The instruments can now see it when it happens; this edition records that it has not yet.
03What counts as the reading layer?
Crawlers that index or train on a site, and fetchers that pull one page because a person asked an assistant a question. On the web this is the AI category of bot traffic, distinguished by declared user agent; on forms it is a person who arrived from an AI answer.
04How do I verify an edition?
Fetch the JSON at /api/index/{edition}, remove the signature block, JSON.stringify the remainder, and verify the Ed25519 signature against the key whose kid matches, published at /.well-known/aethelforge/keys.
05Which businesses are in the fleet?
Sites, lines and widgets operated by iSimplifyMe for its clients. They are never named in the Index. Figures are aggregates; the per-site detail stays with each client.