Room 05 of 08 · rules stated before counting
How we count.
The same activity can be counted five ways, and each way is defensible. Rather than choose the flattering one and hide the rest, all five are published with the exact number that falls away at each step.
The steps subtract precisely; a reader can check the arithmetic without trusting us.
191,609 LOGGED ATTEMPTS138,811 CREDITED SERVED READS9,704 DISTINCT ANCHORS REACHED
Section 01
The inclusion ladder.
| Step | What is being counted | Count | Falls away | What that means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Every logged attempt | 191,609 | — | Anything at all arrived at a citation surface and was recorded, including the 16,161 rows with no recorded status. |
| 02 | The server answered | 165,967 | −25,642 | Status 200 or 206. Redirects, errors and rows with no recorded status all fall away here. |
| 03 | Content actually left the building | 157,614 | −8,353 | More than zero bytes recorded. An empty 200 is not a read. |
| 04 | Served reads | 138,811 | −18,803 | The agent withdrawn from credit is removed. This is the figure used everywhere else on this instrument. |
| 05 | Distinct anchors reached | 9,704 | — | A different question, not a subset of the row above: how many separate signposts were reached at least once, across 33,924 distinct agent-and-anchor pairings. |
Step 01 minus the three falls-away figures equals step 04 exactly (191,609 − 25,642 − 8,353 − 18,803 = 138,811).Step 05 counts anchors, not requests.
Source: wp_teas_citations - window: 2 Jun 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 - rule: HTTP 200 or 206 with more than zero recorded bytes, excluding Amazonbot and known internal probe source records - live, read at page generation.
The honest contrast: 53,203 anchors are published, and 9,704 have been reached at least once. The offer is far wider than the uptake, and both numbers stay on the page.
Section 02
The headline ledger - every measure, five timescales.
Each row states which table it came from; the tables began on different days, so the lifetime column is not the same window for every row. The rows count different events and are never summed.
| Measure | Today so far | Yesterday | Last 7 days | Last 30 days | Lifetime of its table |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Served reads Citation table - 2 Jun 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 | 877 | 1,439 | 7,307 | 32,083 | 138,811 |
| Citation-surface attempts Citation table - every logged request | 1,015 | 1,555 | 8,300 | 35,068 | 191,609 |
| Attempts that carried no content Citation table - outside the served rule | 138 | 116 | 993 | 2,985 | 33,995 |
| Attempts withdrawn from credit Citation table - Amazonbot | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 21,796 |
The four citation-table rows share one source and window; the remaining measures are below with theirs.
The other 6 measures - doors, images, sessions, traces, probessame five timescales, each row naming its own table and start
| Measure | Today so far | Yesterday | Last 7 days | Last 30 days | Lifetime of its table |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Door knocks Door-knock table - 10 May 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 | 13,594 | 16,887 | 102,230 | 474,982 | 3,420,054 |
| Image pulls by named crawlers Asset-knock table - 8 Jun 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6,699 |
| Recorded sessions Session table - 10 May 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 | 2,725 | 2,297 | 14,642 | 72,400 | 1,666,377 |
| AI-referred sessions Session table - referrer or stamp names an AI surface | 4 | 10 | 42 | 208 | 2,666 |
| Traced API requests Trace table - 17 Jun 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 | 8,626 | 11,920 | 65,290 | 308,584 | 1,219,877 |
| Our own verification probes Trace table - never counted as demand | 1,579 | 1,529 | 12,246 | 60,451 | 88,027 |
Source: five primary tables read at render - the rollup that double-ingests citation rows is read nowhere on this instrument - live.
Section 03
What is actually being measured.
Addressable pages
3,659
2,737 pages, 16 posts, 906 products - counted at render time rather than held as a constant.
Citation anchors
53,203
One stable identifier per registered heading, so a machine can quote a paragraph rather than a page.
Images on record
5,780
Image attachments counted from the media tables at render.
Days of capture
156
2 Jun 2026 to 4 Nov 2026 - about 890 served reads a day on average.
| Where the anchors are | Section anchors | Pages | Listed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product pages | 16,897 | 906 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| Tea wiki entries | 24,869 | 1,896 | /anchor-sitemap.md |
| News stories | 159 | 15 | /anchor-sitemap.md |
| Recipes | 4,422 | 685 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| Recipe collections | 118 | 27 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| Brand pages | 762 | 110 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| Category pages | 86 | 34 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| Tea journeys | 12 | 6 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| News categories | 7 | 5 | /anchor-sitemap.txt |
| Guides, policies and landing pages | 516 | 59 | /anchor-sitemap.md |
| Under the Hood rooms | 220 | 11 | /anchor-sitemap.md |
48,068 section headings across 3,754 pages, by the kind of page they sit on. Each is a stable id on the heading itself, so a machine can quote the section rather than the page. The citation feed adds each page's source note on top.
Source: the anchor index, written from each page as it is served - read at render, held for an hour.
Section 04
Every term, one meaning.
| Term | Meaning | Rule applied | What it is not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logged attempt | A request arrived at a citation surface and we recorded a row. | Any row in the citation table. | Not evidence that anything was sent back. |
| Served read | Content left our server and went to a named AI or search agent. | Status 200 or 206, bytes above zero, agent not withdrawn from credit. | Not evidence that anyone read it, understood it, or named us anywhere. |
| Withdrawn from credit | An agent whose reads are recorded and shown but excluded from totals. | Applied to Amazonbot for ignoring published limits. | Not deleted, not hidden, and for a period not even refused. |
| Door knock | A recorded request at a registered machine entry point. | Any row in the door-knock table. | Not a citation and not a person. Undercounted before 7 August 2026. |
| Citation anchor | A published signpost a machine can land on and quote. | A row in the published anchor file. | What we offered, not what anyone took. |
| Followback | A later request carrying the trace of an earlier offer. | Match confidence of strong. Weaker matches are published but never quoted. | Not a purchase and not a citation. |
| Recorded session | A row in the session table, of any kind. | Every row. No filter is possible. | Not a person. The table classifies every row it has ever written as human, so the column carries no information. |
| AI-referred session | A browser arrived and its referrer named an AI answer surface. | Session flagged AI-attributed, or first referrer class is an AI surface. | Evidence the link was followed, not that an AI recommended us. |
| Image pull | A named AI or search crawler requested an image file. | A row in the asset-knock table whose agent class is a named AI or search crawler. | A floor, not a count. Capture has been intermittent since 20 June 2026. |
| Our own probe | Traffic we generated ourselves to check a surface still answers. | Traces flagged as verification test traffic. | Not demand. Subtracted wherever demand is reported. |
| Citation token | A branded appreciation token tied to qualifying evidence under one of five published classes: served read, followback, verified click-back, probable click-back, attributed sale. Stage 1 is written by the v4 writer, stages 2 to 4 by the v5 writer, on one ledger. | The class-specific evidence and deduplication rule must pass, and the mint must be live. | Not automatically proof that our name appeared inside an answer. |
| Evidence day | A completed UTC day, processed exactly once. | The daily run evaluates only the previous complete day. | The unfinished current day. |
Twelve terms, one meaning each, governing every room and every machine-readable mirror. Where an older JSON mirror carries a legacy field name, the definition here governs.
Words we no longer use - and why each was wrongambiguity is fixed by definition, never by deletion; the record of retired wordings stays
| What earlier versions did | Why it was wrong | The term used now |
|---|---|---|
| Four separate labels, all built on the word "successful", each attached to a different figure. | A reader could not tell which of the four a given number belonged to, and two of them implied a citation had occurred when none had been measured. | Served read, with one rule. |
| A long phrase describing unfiltered crawler requests, never defined anywhere on the page. | It carried no rule, so it could not be checked. | Logged attempt. |
| An informal phrase for arrivals at machine entry points. | It was used for two different tables in two different sections. | Door knock, tied to one table. |
| A label that read as a category of agent rather than a decision we had taken. | It described the crawler instead of describing our own choice to exclude it, and the page claimed a block the server was not enforcing. | Withdrawn from credit, with the block now enforced. |
| A two-word phrase for a token, one word of which was redundant. | A token is minted by definition. The extra word suggested a second kind existed. | Citation token. |
| Session counts published as though they described people. | The session table classifies every row it has ever written the same way, so the label could not be earned. | Recorded session, with the AI-referred subset labelled separately. |
Section 06
Tags, origins and tool answers.
Campaign tags. Many links carry a short tag, for example ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it shows. Our pages are served from a cache close to the reader, so the first page of a visit usually never reaches our server. From 6 October 2026 we read the tag from the address your browser sends with its next request to us, such as adding something to your basket. Nothing is stored on your device for this.
Where an order came from. We take the strongest evidence we hold, in this order: a link we made (an assistant's checkout or basket link, or one of our own links); a tag or a referring site seen by our server in the same visit; what the customer told us; an earlier order by the same customer; otherwise unknown, with the reason.
Keep reading
Where this leads next.
One study, one style, eight rooms. The legacy room addresses now land on the room that absorbed their content, and every machine mirror keeps its original path.
