The Detection Layer · Created by Chris Hudson and Ben Reuling · Operational May 2026
See the machines visiting you.
Hound is an agent detector for public websites. It scores every session that touches a dealership website, in real time, across five labels. Human. Uncertain. Likely Agent. Agent. Verified. It runs today at its first deployment site, Mark Miller Subaru.
The traffic was always there. Now it has a label.
Methodology
How Hound labels a session.
Every visit gets one of five labels before the page finishes loading. The labels are built from signals in the request and the browsing behavior, never from who the person is.
Hound scores sessions, not people. No personal information is collected or stored.
How it works
Detection now. Verification next.
Behavioral scoring
Every session is scored in real time. User-agent strings, request patterns, header signatures, navigation behavior, and fingerprint analysis combine into a label within milliseconds. The session is tagged before the page finishes loading.
Cryptographic verification
When an agent presents a signed identity, Hound checks the signature against trusted operator registries. Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other known operators can be verified in real time. A verified agent is not a threat. It is a warm lead. The emerald label is reserved for them.
The dealer who sees the agents owns the relationships they bring.
The five labels
Not all agents are equal.
Human
A person browsing. Probably on a phone. Probably looking at inventory. Treat them the way you always have.
Uncertain
The signals do not add up to a confident label yet. Hound holds judgment until evidence accumulates.
Likely Agent
Multiple signals suggest agent activity, identity unconfirmed. This is where most of the action lives today. The agents are here. They have not announced themselves.
Agent
Confirmed AI agent traffic by behavioral and technical signature. Identity unknown, classification certain. An agent visited. Now there is a record.
Verified WARM LEAD
A named, cryptographically authenticated operator. A verified agent is not a threat. It is a warm lead, and the ARM can meet it directly through the Agentic Dealer Network.
Why this matters
You cannot manage what you cannot see.
The CRM worked because every lead announced itself: a name, a number, an inbox. The agent does not. It arrives without ceremony, reads inventory, sometimes asks for a quote, and leaves no trace in the systems most dealers run.
Detection comes first. Deployment comes second. Without detection, deployment is guessing.
Most dealerships have agent traffic right now and no idea. It shows up in analytics as “direct” or “unknown,” or gets flagged as a bot. Much of it is a shopper’s own AI agent doing the legwork. Block it and you turn away a buyer.
Hound tells you which visitors are machines.
GEO tells you whether the machines can find you at all.
Run both. They are two sides of the same question.
Dealer who wants to see your own agent traffic? Operator who wants your agent Verified instead of Uncertain? Write.