Whole site

Where this is used

Case 1Showing that you published it first

An article, a study, a product description, a set of photographs: the work is yours, and six months later it appears elsewhere, reworded, or turns up in the output of a machine that learned from it. The question that then decides the matter is not whether the texts resemble each other, but which of them existed first. The usual answers (a timestamp in your own publishing system, an entry in your own database) come from the party that benefits from them.

Because every address in the sitemap is fetched daily, the record carries the day each one was first seen by a third party that was not looking for it. That date was sealed and handed out of this house on the night it was made, long before anyone thought of a dispute.

Copyright · priority disputes · publishers and agencies

Case 2What your shop told the buying machines

A growing share of orders is placed by software acting for a customer, and software does not read the page a person sees. It reads the structured data behind it: the price as a machine-readable field, the availability, the delivery promise, the feed. When a dispute follows (wrong price, wrong stock, a promise that was never meant that way), it is about what the machine was told, and that layer is invisible in any screenshot.

A site under daily observation records both at once, because both arrive in the same bytes. What the structured data said on the day of the order is then a matter of record rather than of reconstruction from a system you control yourself.

E-commerce · pricing and availability disputes · company counsel

Case 3The version that existed before the relaunch

Sites are rebuilt, addresses change, old pages disappear or are merged into new ones. Afterwards the previous state exists only in a backup, and a backup is an internal artefact: an opponent is entitled to ask who could have changed it and when, and there is no good answer.

Where the site stood under observation before the rebuild, every page of the old version is on record for each day it existed, together with the day it stopped answering. Nothing had to be exported, and nobody had to think of it at the time.

Relaunch and migration · brand and product claims · in-house counsel

What you can use it for

For every address in the sitemap, and for every day from the admission onwards:

• On which day was this address first seen? The question that decides a priority dispute.
• What exactly did it say on any given day, byte for byte, including the structured data a person never sees?
• On which days did it change, and what did it say before each change?
• On which day did it stop answering, if it did?
• Since when has an independent third party been recording it, and can that be checked without us?

1. You show the domain is yoursThe sitemap then decides the scope, not a list you have to maintain.
2. Both witnesses retrieve every address dailyUp to five hundred, each storing its own copy.
3. The day is sealedEvery observation of the day is reduced to one fingerprint.
4. The root is anchored outside this archiveHanded out of the house the same day, so it cannot be corrected later.

The sitemap is read afresh each day, so a page published tomorrow is covered tomorrow, without anyone reporting it. The domain itself joins the core at the same time, at no extra charge.

Typical use: this is rarely filed on its own. It creates the record from which a document is drawn later, an extract for one day, or a twelve-month record when the question is on which day something changed.

What is recorded, field by field

The sitemap itself is fetched and sealed daily, and so is every address it lists, by each witness separately: the exact bytes the server delivered, their SHA-256 fingerprint, the complete response headers, the TLS certificate chain presented at delivery, the address the request finally resolved to after any redirects, and the moment of retrieval in UTC. Stored in full, without a size limit. Where a page is absent or the server refuses, that fact is recorded with the same care as content.

The sealed sitemap is what makes the first-seen date worth anything. It is not our note that an address appeared; it is the site’s own declaration, on a day that was sealed and anchored outside this archive that night.

The domain comes with it. Booking a site also admits the domain itself to the core, at no extra charge: its front page and the four machine-readable files at its root (robots.txt, ai.txt, /.well-known/tdmrep.json, llms.txt), on the same daily footing.

Full field-by-field schema, with a worked example: what we store.

What is not recorded, and one condition

Your own domain only. This one is not available for somebody else’s site, and the reason is not commercial. Fetching five hundred addresses of a stranger’s domain every day is a load we are not willing to place on a server whose operator did not ask for it. We ask for a simple showing that the domain is yours, a file we name, placed at its root, or an e-mail from an address on that domain. For someone else’s site the answer is pages, with the addresses that actually matter named one by one.

What the sitemap does not declare is not covered. The scope is the site’s own list. A page missing from it is missing from the record, and no one here goes looking for pages the site does not announce.

Bytes, not pixels. What the server sent, not how a browser would have drawn it. Where a matter turns on what a page looked like, this is the wrong instrument, and we would rather say so before you pay.

Also not recorded: anything behind a login, any rating, any comparison. And no notification: if a page changes you will not hear from us, because a witness that alerts one side is no longer a witness to both.

What sealed means here

This block is the same on every page of this site, and it is repeated on purpose: it is the part you need in order to judge everything else.

1. One fingerprint for the whole day. Every observation made that day, yours among hundreds of thousands, is reduced to a single hash through a Merkle tree. One changed byte anywhere in that day, and the fingerprint no longer matches. There is no version that could be quietly corrected.
2. Published where anyone can see it. The fingerprint goes into the public log the same night, under a fixed, citable URL, together with the instructions for recomputing it.
3. Handed out of the house three times on the same day. An RFC 3161 time-stamp service, a decentralised OpenTimestamps anchor in the Bitcoin blockchain, and a qualified eIDAS time-stamp from GLOBALTRUST (e-commerce monitoring GmbH, Austria), a qualified trust service provider listed on the EU Trusted List. The third of these is paid for and supervised, and it is worth saying so plainly: only the qualified time-stamp carries the presumption laid down in Article 41(2) eIDAS. A free anchor establishes that the data existed and has not changed, but it carries no presumption laid down by law.
4. Twice over, by two witnesses that cannot write to each other. Two machines at two providers in two countries, with separate keys. Each seals its own day and takes its own anchors.

In plain words, two sentences. We cannot change a byte afterwards, because the day's fingerprint would no longer match. And we cannot backdate one, because that fingerprint has been in other people's hands since the night it was made. No one has to believe us: every step can be repeated with standard tools.

Further: how it works · what we store · glossary.

Does this stand up in court?

We cannot promise that, and nobody can promise it honestly: what a court accepts is for the court to decide. What we can tell you is what the document is made of, and each of the four facts below can be checked before you buy anything.

1. It comes from a third party, not from you. Not your screenshot, not your server log. The bytes were fetched and stored by a third party that did not know your matter existed, on a day chosen by the calendar and not by the case. That is the difference between a record and an account of events.
2. A presumption laid down by law. Every sealed day since 31 July 2026 carries a qualified electronic time-stamp from a qualified trust service provider on the EU Trusted List. Under Article 41(2) of Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 (eIDAS), such a time-stamp enjoys a presumption of the accuracy of the date and time it indicates and of the integrity of the data it is linked to. Article 41(1) says something much narrower, namely that a time-stamp may not be denied legal effect merely because it is electronic. The two paragraphs are routinely confused; the one that matters here is the second.
3. Two independent witnesses. Two machines, two providers, two countries, separate keys. Each one seals its own day and anchors it externally on its own. Neither can write to the other, so neither can be corrected to match the other after the fact.
4. Verifiable without us. An appointed expert repeats every step with standard tools: recompute the hash of the file, rebuild the path from that hash to the day's root, check the root against the public log and against the external anchors. We do not have to be believed, and that is the point of the whole construction.

What follows from this in your particular matter is for your lawyer to say. We do not advise, do not rate and do not take a side, and the other side can order the same document on the same published terms. That is not a weakness of the document. It is the reason it is worth anything.

How to order

1. By e-mail to contact@machinewitness.eu, or through the form on this site. Name the domain, and your billing address with a VAT number if you have one. We do not ask what the matter is.
2. We confirm in writing what we received and name the fee for your request. Nothing is charged before you have that in writing.
3. You receive a payment link.
4. Nothing is delivered at this stage, because what you are buying is the record itself. Extracts drawn from it later arrive within five working days; where a court deadline is running, say so when you order and we handle it within 48–72 hours instead, ahead of the normal queue.
5. The site is entered, with its date, in the public record, within five working days of payment, and the sitemap is read daily from then on.

We answer in German, English or Spanish.

Fee

450 € per year, or 45 € per month, for one domain with up to five hundred addresses from its sitemap, as set out in the fee table. The admission of the domain itself is included. If it is not renewed, nothing is taken away: the days already recorded stay sealed and remain available as extracts, and the domain stays in the core; what lapses is the daily reading of the sitemap. A record here is never withdrawn, because a gap in a record is worth less than no record at all.

Form of the result

The admission itself: a dated entry in the public record, on both witnesses, checkable at any time through the coverage check. There is no document at this stage, because the document is the extract or the twelve-month record drawn later from the days that were recorded.

The method sheet is included. Every extract comes with the general method sheet at no extra charge, including the one covering a single day. It describes how this archive observes, seals and anchors, and it carries a version and a date. It is not written for your matter, and it does not have to be: it is the same for everyone, which is precisely what makes it checkable.

The technical procedure statement is a different document, written for this particular observation, signed and addressed to a court or an appointed expert. You do not need it in order to file the extract. It becomes relevant when the other side disputes the method rather than the content. See the fee table.

What becomes public, and what does not

Visible to anyone

• that the domain or URL is observed, and from which date
• the dated entry in the public record of admissions
• the daily roots and anchors, as for every other observation

Never published

• who applied, in no document
• why: we do not ask what the matter is
• what the files said: content is issued only as an extract, at the published fee, to anyone

The other side can see that the URL is observed, and since when. That is the price of a witness that belongs to no party, and it belongs here, before the purchase, not in the small print. Where a look-alike domain is observed as a precaution, an opponent may infer that someone is preparing. Whoever does not want that buys a capture of a single day instead of a standing observation.

Neutrality. This archive records; it does not rate, rank or advise. Three conditions hold for everything on this page: it is visible to everyone in the same way; the fee is published and depends neither on who asks nor on how a matter ends; and whoever pays receives nothing a third party would not also receive, which means no notification, no mention as the applicant, no priority, and no content without an extract that anyone else could order too.

Further reading: how it works · evidence extract · terms, section 5.