SEO safety — what Gate will never do

A tool that can block visitors has to be safer than the person configuring it in a hurry. These guarantees are enforced by the engine on every request, in every enforcement point, whatever the policy says. They are not settings.

Search engines are never restricted

Google, Bing, Apple, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo and Seznam crawlers pass every rule. The only exception is a rule that names the search engine by id and carries acknowledge_seo_impact: true; the policy editor refuses to save such a rule without the flag and warns when it is set. Targeting the whole search_indexer category with a restrictive action is refused outright.

People are never restricted

A visitor with no declared agent identity whose behaviour reads as human, or as uncertain, is never throttled, challenged, redirected or blocked. A restrictive rule cannot even be written against human or uncertain traffic. The reading comes from Tactical's classifier, which can be wrong: at add-to-cart and checkout, a person it misreads as an agent could be asked to identify (see Session reputation). Blocking still needs the high tier.

Blocking needs confidence

block and redirect only apply to visitors at the high or verified tier: a registry agent whose Web Bot Auth signature verified (see Verified agents), or behaviour the engine is at least 85% sure is automated. Below that, the rule's block becomes an allow and the decision log says why.

Observe first

Every template and every new policy starts in Observe mode. Rules tag what they would have done; nothing is enforced. The Gate page replays the policy over the last seven days of real traffic before you turn enforcement on.

Fall open

No policy, an unreachable Tactical, an expired cache, an exception anywhere: the request passes untouched. Enforcement points never block on the network inside a visitor's request except a policy refresh that runs at most once every five minutes with a two-second timeout.

Two ways out

The kill switch on the Gate page turns every rule into tag-only in one click. And if a store in Enforce mode blocks or redirects more than 20% of its decided requests in the last hour, enforcement reverts to Observe on its own, within about a minute of crossing the line, and the owner is emailed.

What is logged

Every enforcement point reports its decisions: who (a declared agent id, never a raw user agent or IP), class and tier, the rule, the intended and the effective action, the guard that softened it, the path, and the policy version. Allows are sampled 1 in 100; everything else is kept for 90 days.