Editorial policy

Why we publish

Most analytics tools hide the non-human half of web traffic, so most people have never had a clear look at it. We write to change that: how crawlers, scrapers and AI agents behave, how to tell a real one from a fake, and what they mean for your site. A piece earns its place if it helps you understand or fix something, whether or not you ever use Lume.

We are not neutral observers. Lume is a product we sell, and our articles cover the problems it solves. When Lume is relevant we say so plainly, alongside the other ways to do the job (logs, your CDN, free tools), and we say what Lume can’t do. We hold our content to the same rule as our product: understate, never overstate.

Who writes and reviews

Every article and glossary entry carries the name of the person responsible for it, and the byline links to their author page, which sets out their background. Today that is Lume’s founder, Nik Andreev, who has spent a decade working in SEO and web analytics. If we publish work by anyone else, they get their own byline and author page.

We never use invented names, stock headshots or credentials a person doesn’t hold. We don’t publish sponsored posts, paid guest posts or affiliate links.

How we source facts

• Primary sources first. Standards documents (IETF RFCs and drafts), the operator’s own documentation for a crawler or agent, official announcements, and the original research report. We link straight to the source, in the sentence it supports.
• Trace it back or cut it. If a statistic or quote only turns up secondhand, we find the original. If we can’t, we either say it is secondhand or leave it out.
• Dated and specific. We state when a figure was measured and by whom, and we prefer recent data. Old or one-off numbers are labeled that way.
• Vendor data is labeled as vendor data. Security and CDN companies publish some of the best traffic research, and we cite it by name. We say where a figure comes from so you can weigh it yourself.
• Precise words. “Verified” means the same thing in an article as it does in the product: we can prove who sent the request. It never means a bot is safe.

How we use Lume’s own data

Some articles and glossary entries include figures from Lume itself. These come only from sites that opted in to anonymous analysis, and we publish them only in aggregate:

• We never name a site or a customer, and never give details that could identify one.
• We use floors (“at least”) and rounded ranges rather than exact counts.
• Every figure sits next to a short method note: the period, what was counted and what was excluded (for example, traffic we identified as a spoofing operation).
• If the sample is too small to support a claim, we don’t make it.

How we use AI tools

We use AI tools for two jobs only: researching a topic (finding and summarizing sources) and verifying facts (checking each claim and figure against its original source).

Some rules don’t bend:

• A person checks every statistic, quote and claim against its original source before it is published, and that person’s name is on the byline.
• AI tools never supply a fact, figure, quote or example that we haven’t checked against a real source.
• We don’t publish pages at scale just to rank in search.

Keeping content current

Crawlers change names, standards move and vendors update their numbers, so we revisit articles when the facts under them change. Each article shows when it was published and when it was last meaningfully updated, and each glossary entry shows when it was last reviewed. We change those dates only for substantive updates such as new data, corrected facts or changed guidance, never for typo fixes or to make a page look fresh.

Corrections

If something we published is wrong, we fix it. When the correction changes a fact, figure or recommendation, we add a dated note at the end of the page saying what changed. Minor fixes (typos, broken links, clearer wording) are made without a note.

To report an error, email hello@lumetraffic.com with the page and what you think is wrong, ideally with a source. We read every report. We correct facts, but we don’t change content because a company would prefer different wording about its product.

Questions

Questions about this policy or anything we have published: hello@lumetraffic.com.