Methodology
How we estimate reach.
The "Estimated potential reach" panel on /proof turns every successful delivery into a number you can compare to a traditional wire's "potential audience" line. This page documents every figure we use and where it came from.
The formula
channel_reach = (distinct releases delivered to channel in window)
× (channel's published weekly or monthly active users)
total_reach = Σ channel_reach across all channels in that bucket"Delivered" means a 2xx response from the channel's API (IndexNow, Google Indexing, Bing Submit, WebSub, Bluesky, Wayback, GitHub Releases) or a real fetch logged by an identified AI crawler in ai_crawler_hits. We never count failed or skipped attempts.
Reach is an upper bound on potential audience, not a measured impression count. A release admitted into ChatGPT's retrieval index can be served to any of ChatGPT's 800M weekly users — it is not guaranteed to be served to all of them. The Citation Monitor on the same page shows the actual, recorded pickups.
AI models & their crawlers
Search engines
Social networks
Permanent archives
What we don't count
- Webhook subscribers. Private fan-out feeds. Counted in deliveries but not in reach — we can't see the subscriber's downstream audience.
- Failed or skipped pings. IndexNow dedup, Bing not-authorized, expired tokens — all excluded.
- Archive view counts. Wayback and the GitHub mirror don't expose per-page views, so they appear as channels that ran but contribute zero to the reach totals.
We update the audience figures quarterly. If you spot one that's stale or wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.