Independent · European · headless
An independent witness to the machine-readable web.
Every day we record what European domains tell machines: the rules for AI crawlers, the opt-outs, the interfaces. Then we seal that record, so it can be proven years later, exactly as it stood.
A flight recorder for a part of the internet almost no one watches, kept by a neutral third party that was already there before any dispute began.
What we record
As software increasingly speaks to software, websites publish machine-readable declarations that humans never see: whether an AI company may use their content for training (robots.txt, ai.txt, TDM reservations), the tools their AI interfaces expose, and the identities of the crawlers themselves.
These declarations can be changed or removed at any moment, without a trace. We visit tens of thousands of European domains every day, store exactly what each one served, and seal it. Years later the archive answers one question: what did domain X serve on day Y?
What we do not do
We do not judge, rank, score, accuse, or advise. We do not decide who is right. We record what was served and seal it, and nothing more.
A witness, not a detective. The value of the record is precisely that it takes no side.
How the proof holds
- Raw capture. The exact bytes each server sent, with the response headers and the TLS certificate chain, stored unaltered.
- Daily seal. Every day is reduced to a single cryptographic fingerprint (a Merkle root) that a third party can recompute from the published record.
- External anchoring. Each day's fingerprint is time-stamped outside our control: today on the Bitcoin blockchain (OpenTimestamps) and by an independent RFC 3161 time-stamp authority. A qualified EU time-stamp and a second, independently operated witness are being added as the archive comes online.
Who keeps it
MachineWitness is built and operated by Martin Schenk (Martin Schenk S.L., Madrid). The archive is designed so that its method, not its keeper, is what anyone relies on: everything it does can be reproduced and checked by a third party, without our help.
Disclosure, so neutrality can be judged openly: should the operator ever advise or represent a party that relies on a MachineWitness record, that involvement is disclosed. The archive takes no side in any dispute.
The public record
The daily fingerprints and the method to verify them are public and permanent. An expert can reproduce the entire chain, without our help, from stable URLs.
Glossary of evidence terms · Root log · How to use a MachineWitness excerpt in court (root log coming soon)