Room 05 of 07 · 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.

633 LOGGED ATTEMPTS629 CREDITED SERVED READS624 DISTINCT ANCHORS REACHED

Section 01

The inclusion ladder.

Step	What is being counted	Count	Falls away	What that means
01	Every logged attempt	633	—	Anything at all arrived at a citation surface and was recorded, including the 0 rows with no recorded status.
02	The server answered	630	−3	Status 200 or 206. Redirects, errors and rows with no recorded status all fall away here.
03	Content actually left the building	629	−1	More than zero bytes recorded. An empty 200 is not a read.
04	Served reads	629	−0	The agent withdrawn from credit is removed. This is the figure used everywhere else on this instrument.
05	Distinct anchors reached	624	—	A different question, not a subset of the row above: how many separate signposts were reached at least once, across 625 distinct agent-and-anchor pairings.

Step 01 minus the three falls-away figures equals step 04 exactly (633 − 3 − 1 − 0 = 629).Step 05 counts anchors, not requests.

Source: wp_sweeties_citations - window: 26 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 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: 2,525 anchors are published, and 624 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	Last 7 days	Last 30 days	Lifetime of its table
Served reads Citation table - 26 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 2026	637	637	637	637
Citation-surface attempts Citation table - every logged request	642	642	642	642
Attempts that carried no content Citation table - outside the served rule	5	5	5	5
Attempts withdrawn from credit Citation table - Amazonbot	0	0	0	0

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	Last 7 days	Last 30 days	Lifetime of its table
Door knocks Door-knock table - 26 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 2026	3,078	3,078	3,078	3,078
Image pulls by named crawlers Asset-knock table - no rows recorded	0	0	0	0
Recorded sessions Session table - 26 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 2026	1,508	1,508	1,508	1,508
AI-referred sessions Session table - referrer or stamp names an AI surface	0	0	0	0
Traced API requests Trace table - 26 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 2026	4,773	4,773	4,773	4,773
Our own verification probes Trace table - never counted as demand	0	0	0	0

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

636

524 pages, 0 posts, 112 products - counted at render time rather than held as a constant.

Citation anchors

2,525

One stable identifier per registered heading, so a machine can quote a paragraph rather than a page.

Images on record

Image attachments counted from the media tables at render.

Days of capture

26 Sep 2026 to 26 Sep 2026 - about 629 served reads a day on average.

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: an image read counts only when it is captured.
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.

Keep reading

Where this leads next.

One study, one style, seven rooms. The legacy room addresses now land on the room that absorbed their content, and every machine mirror keeps its original path.

What we can prove

The claim these counting rules exist to keep narrow.

Open the record →

What runs, and when

The scheduled jobs that keep every rollup here current, with their run records.

Open the record →

What we got wrong

Every correction these rules produced, dated and never removed.

Open the record →