Dark Visitors Is Now
Known Agents

An evolved name for a new era of the internet. From Gavin King, Founder.

How We Outgrew "Dark Visitors"

Dark Visitors was never supposed to be a company.

Two years ago, it started as a side project: a single web page listing the user agents of the eight AI bots that existed at the time, meant to give website owners visibility into the oncoming wave of unseen artificial traffic that was headed their way.

Fast forward to today, and AI bots are one of the most talked-about topics in tech. Their numbers are exploding, and their behavior is top of mind for every online industry. This surge of interest unexpectedly propelled us to the top of Hacker News. We added new features and became a real company. Thousands of websites across the internet started using us, including some of the biggest names in publishing, ecommerce, and education.

However, with AI bots now in the spotlight, people stopped hearing "dark" as "hidden" the way we intended (like "dark matter"). Instead, they heard "bad."

This is misaligned with our mission. We are not an "anti-bot" company. Bots are just code. They can be used for "bad" things, like using IP in a way that the creator doesn't want, or "good" things, like making a purchase on behalf of a real customer. So, something needed to change.

Why "Known Agents" Fits the Future

The internet is transitioning to a new era where bots use it as much as (or even more than) humans, and the bot detection/avoidance arms race will inevitably fade as this matures.

Transparency will become the norm. Most serious AI companies (e.g., OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Browserbase) are already adopting protocols like HTTP Message Signatures to identify their bots. They're also implementing MCP, ACP, and UCP to facilitate structured agentic interactions. We're also playing a role here by maintaining the largest and most accurate list of known agents on the internet, considered a gold standard knowledge base across the industry.

This new name allows us to play to our strengths. We are not a security company, and never have been. Our specialty is helping website owners navigate this new reality in a way that's best for their business, within a trusted ecosystem that provides mutual benefit to all sides. These are much more interesting problems to solve.

What This Means for You

Our Customers

Nothing is changing. Our current features like Agent Analytics, LLM Referral Tracking, Automatic Robots.txt, and our new agentic commerce offerings are already aligned with our current mission and new name. Future features will be too. Your current integrations will continue to work as expected, with no updates required.

Our Partners

As always, we're excited to work with companies who share this vision for an AI ecosystem that provides value to everyone involved. If you'd like to collaborate, please reach out to us.

Thank You

Thank you for your support as we've grown from a side project into what we are today. We couldn't have done this without the community that rallied around the original vision, and we're excited to continue building the future of the internet together.