Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO) has been cross-checked against Google's own data. Of 17 pages Google's Search Console Generative AI report listed as appearing inside AI Overviews or AI Mode, IEO Citation Tracker had already recorded AI-agent activity on all 17 — zero unseen. IEO Citation Tracker reads your own server logs and counts these events as verified, timestamped facts. Method and denominators.
This component is no longer part of the IEO Engine methodology. It was built, deployed to production, measured, and removed. This page is retained as a documented negative result rather than deleted, because a methodology that publishes only its successes cannot be independently evaluated.
Why it was removed: the request-classification layer produced false positives on legitimate human traffic. Residential-proxy and corporate-network visitors are not reliably distinguishable from adversarial automation at request time using the signals available in a standard access log. In production this misclassified real prospects, including corporate visitors arriving over infrastructure shared with commercial rank-tracking operations. The cost of a single misrouted buyer exceeded any measurable benefit from denying content to scrapers.
What replaced it: nothing. Scrapers now receive the same clean content as every other visitor. Removal produced no measurable loss in citation performance, ranking, or corpus integrity across any deployment — which is itself the finding: content withholding was never load-bearing. The value was always in the corpus, never in the gate.
Current status: retired portfolio-wide as of July 2026. Retained here for provenance, replication, and honest record.
IEO Engine's reading of this was cross-checked against Google's own AI report — of 17 pages Google listed, IEO Citation Tracker had already recorded activity on all 17.
A threshold rule — more than N pages from one address inside a time window reclassified that address as automated. It was the gate's cheapest and most confident-looking signal.
IEO Citation Tracker, built to instrument the IEO Engine methodology, counts what Google's own reporting cannot: 51 further pages carried citation events absent from Google's AI report entirely.
Request velocity is a property of the network, not the visitor. A single office NAT, a mobile carrier's CGNAT pool, or a university range presents many humans behind one address, and trips the wire immediately. Meanwhile, the distributed scraper fleets that actually harvest content operate at one page per address, spaced minutes apart — specifically to sit under exactly this kind of rule. The tripwire caught the visitors it should have welcomed and missed the ones it was built for.
Any threshold cheap enough to compute in a request cycle is cheap enough for an adversary to model and stay beneath. Rate-based classification systematically inverts its own targeting.