CiteTrack matches each request’s user-agent against a signature database of the current AI crawler catalog, then assigns a confidence score.
Verification
For bots that publish official host ranges (Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot and others) CiteTrack performs forward-confirmed reverse-DNS: the visitor IP’s hostname must end with the official domain and resolve back to the same IP. Verification runs in a batched hourly job, never on the page request, so it adds no front-end latency.
Spoofing
A request claiming to be “GPTBot” from an unrelated IP is flagged spoofed with a low confidence score instead of being trusted.