Independent · European · headless
An independent witness to the European 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.
Is a domain observed? One domain at a time, hashed in your browser — not a search engine, and no directory of what we hold.
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?
Why this matters in practice
Under EU copyright law, a text-and-data-mining opt-out only counts if it was machine-readable at the time (OLG Hamburg, 10 Dec 2025) — so what a domain's robots.txt or ai.txt actually said on a given day is often the fact a dispute turns on. Those files can be edited or removed by anyone with server access, with no trace of the earlier version. MachineWitness exists so that fact does not depend on anyone's memory or goodwill: a publisher who reserved their content, an AI company that trained on it anyway, or a court weighing the claim can all point to the same sealed, externally time-stamped record of what was actually served that day.
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, stored unaltered, together with the response headers and the fingerprint of the TLS certificate presented at the time. What a record contains, field by field.
- 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 deposited outside our control the same day: with an independent RFC 3161 time-stamp authority, which returns its proof at once, and with OpenTimestamps, which aggregates it towards the Bitcoin blockchain. The current state of each anchor.
- Qualified EU time-stamp. Since the daily root of 31 July 2026, each day's fingerprint additionally carries a qualified electronic time-stamp under eIDAS, issued by GLOBALTRUST (e-commerce monitoring GmbH, Austria), a qualified trust service provider on the EU Trusted List. The nine earlier roots, from 22 to 30 July 2026, were time-stamped on 31 July 2026: for those days the qualified stamp shows that the root existed no later than that date, while the day itself remains evidenced by the anchors taken at the time.
- Second independent witness. Since 4 August 2026 a second witness records the same targets from separate infrastructure in another country, under its own operator key, and seals and anchors its own daily root. Neither machine can write to the other. Days sealed from 22 July to 3 August 2026 rest on the first witness alone, and the public log marks them as such. The two roots are not identical and are not meant to be: each witness observes on its own schedule, so their records differ in detail — what they provide is two independently kept accounts of the same days, not one account repeated.
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.
What we store about a domain · Is a domain observed? · Glossary of evidence terms · Public root log