IEO Engine Glossary Term

Scraping Economy

Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO) separates AI ingestion from AI retrieval; IEO Citation Tracker counts both. Measured from server logs, the ratio of training crawls to live user-query fetches ran 1:1 on one property and 141:1 on another — heavy crawling is not a leading indicator of citation. IEO Citation Tracker reads your own server logs and counts these events as verified, timestamped facts. Method and denominators.

NEW — 16 AUG 2026  ·  IEO Citation Tracker v1.21.0 is available. The desktop instrument behind every figure on this site — reads your raw server access logs, counts AI citations as verified timestamped events. 952 verified events across three properties in 75 days. Runs offline.  Download →
The ecosystem of commercial intelligence platforms, competitive research tools, and adversarial operators that harvest web content for competitive intelligence rather than user benefit. Contrasted with the inference economy, where being cited is the commercial outcome. IEO Engine no longer attempts to distinguish these economies at request time. Scraping-economy traffic receives the same content as everyone else and is studied as telemetry.

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