About
Telltale Bot is made by Quantable Analytics, a small analytics consulting company founded in 2012. It tells you which visits to your site come from people, which from AI agents acting for a person, and which from bots.
Who we are
Telltale Bot is built and run by Jason Packer, the owner and principal consultant of Quantable. He has more than 20 years of experience building and tuning websites of every size, as a Unix systems administrator, web programmer, network engineer and SEO specialist. LinkedIn.
Why we built it
Bots in analytics data are an old problem for us. In 2015 we launched a referral spam filter for Google Analytics that thousands of sites used, and we kept a bot segment in the Universal Analytics solutions gallery. Later came bot filters in Google Tag Manager and a server-side plugin. Each one worked inside the limits of the analytics tool, and none was close to ideal.
The enterprise bot platforms are accurate, and we've used many of them, but they are priced and built for security teams: you change your infrastructure, tune rules and sign a contract. For most sites, bots are an analytics problem, not a security one. Telltale Bot aims for the same accuracy from one tag, at a price a single site can pay.
AI agents made it more urgent. A visit from ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini acting for a person is not a crawler and not a person browsing, and analytics tools count it as one or the other. We wanted a third answer, and the name of the agent.
How we run it
- We identify, we never block. Telltale Bot tells you what a visit is and leaves what to do about it to you.
- Detection data stays separate from analytics. Telling people from bots means looking closely at the browser, so we keep it to that: it is never used to target ads or to follow what people do on your site. The security and privacy pages say what is collected and for how long.
- We test against the real thing. We run the AI agents we name against our own test pages, reading and acting (AI agents we recognize), and the bots we catch against six analytics tools (Bots vs. your analytics). The comparison puts us next to the enterprise platforms, with their prices.
- Small, and you reach the people who build it. Write to support@telltale.bot and the people who build Telltale Bot answer, within 72 hours.
Contact
Questions, a trial, a security review: support@telltale.bot. You can also try the public demo or read our launch post on quantable.com.
Last updated .