What's the difference between verified and unverified bots?
Why Cloudflare shows verified AI crawlers with a separate unverified count, while Vercel, Akamai and Netlify count user-agent claims.
Any program can call itself "GPTBot" in its user agent. Whether Opttab can prove a request really came from that crawler depends on your log source.
| Verified | Claimed | |
|---|---|---|
| Sources | Cloudflare | Vercel, Akamai, Netlify |
| How it works | Cloudflare checks the request came from the crawler's owner | Opttab counts a request when its user agent contains a crawler's name |
| Look-alikes | Shown separately as +N unverified | Counted with the real ones |
What "+N unverified" means
On Cloudflare, +N unverified next to a crawler counts requests that used its name but failed Cloudflare's check — scrapers posing as GPTBot, for example. They're shown so you know they exist, but kept out of the main figure.
Which should I trust?
Cloudflare figures are the most reliable. Vercel, Akamai and Netlify figures are a good guide to trends, but can include a few impostors.
Cloudflare may also verify AI bots that aren't in Opttab's list. Those appear under Unidentified in Why they came?.