By Evan Vega
On its first night online, a new website counted 65 machines and 20 people.
The site is 13labs.org, and counting is its whole job. By 02:40 UTC on 22 October 2026, a few hours after launch, its live instrument had classified 94 visits: 65 machine, 20 human, 8 it refused to guess about, and 1 hybrid — the lab’s own test of a commercial stealth browser, caught pretending to be a person’s. Link previewers, the Internet Archive’s crawler, a rule-breaking scraper, bare scripts and Google’s search crawler made up the machine column, plus one undeclared reader that never ran a script.
13 Labs is the skunk works of Novel Cognition, the AI strategy and entity-architecture practice founded by Guerin Green. It sorts every visitor into human, hybrid or machine without cookies or fingerprinting, and posts the tally in public in its Signal Room.
The old split was humans and bots. 13 Labs says that split is broken, and it built its home page around the replacement. Every visit is sorted into one of three bins, plus an honest fourth:
The hybrid bin is the point. A growing share of visits are AI agents reading on a person’s behalf, and a traffic report that lumps them in with crawlers — or worse, with humans — is now wrong about who its audience is. 13 Labs files the experiment as EXP-07, codename THE ROOM, and the instrument is the site itself. If you load 13labs.org, you are in the sample.
Ideas come in as hunches and leave as instruments — or not at all.
Lockheed’s original Skunk Works ran on fourteen rules written by its founding engineer, Kelly Johnson. 13 Labs kept the spirit, cut one, and rewrote the rest for a lab whose readers include machines. The charter is public. A few of the rules, verbatim:
Rule thirteen is a black bar. The page says only that “the thirteenth rule is not written down.”
And the name? “Thirteen is the number buildings skip: the missing floor in the elevator. A lab should live on the floor nobody planned for.”
The site went live on the evening of 21 October 2026, US time. Within hours the instrument had three catches worth naming.
The fake phone. In the first thirty minutes, a visitor presenting itself as Chrome on a Pixel 6 read fifteen pages and then took the forbidden link — the hidden path robots.txt rules off-limits and no person can see on the page. It was a scraper running on Google Cloud. A real phone owner never finds that link. Only software that reads every link and ignores the rules ends up there.
The archivist. The Internet Archive’s crawler walked into the same trap. 13 Labs counts it as a machine like any other; the trap does not care how respectable the visitor is.
The 32-gigabyte liar. This one the lab sent itself. 13 Labs pointed a commercial stealth browser, Firecrawl, at its own Signal Room. It hid every automation flag and still got caught: it claimed 32 GB of device memory, and real Chrome never reports more than 8 — the browser’s device-memory reading tops out there by design. A number the real browser cannot produce is a costume, and the visit was filed as a spoofed hybrid: a scripted browser pretending to be a person’s.
The running tally is public. By 02:40 UTC on 22 October, a few hours after launch, the Signal Room had classified 94 visits: 65 machine, 20 human, 8 unresolved and 1 hybrid. Machines outnumbered people more than three to one on the site’s first night. Three requests had already hit the trap. The raw aggregate is published as a data file anyone can read: 13labs.org/signals.json.
The bot detector is experiment seven. The experiment ledger lists nine, each with a codename, a hypothesis, an instrument and a stamp: five active, three fielded, one classified.
Fielded means the method worked and left the lab for Novel Cognition. Active means it is running now.
The Signal Room runs on four layers, and a visit gets the first verdict that fits:
A visitor is hybrid if it declares itself an AI agent acting for a person — ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User — or if it runs the script under automation: webdriver flags, headless engines, synthetic events. It is a machine if it declares itself a crawler, never runs the script and sends none of the headers a real browser sends, or walks into the trap. It is human only if it runs the script, shows no automation tells, and produces trusted input: real pointer movement, scrolling, keys or taps.
The privacy rules are part of the design, not a footnote. No cookies are set. A random session id lives in the tab’s sessionStorage and dies with it. The server keeps raw logs for 14 days and publishes only aggregate counts — no IP addresses, ever.
Novel Cognition does client work: AI strategy, entity architecture, and search visibility after the AI shift. That work needs methods that are proven, and proving them takes a place where things are allowed to fail cheaply, on the real web. 13 Labs is that place. What survives is handed to Novel Cognition; what doesn’t is written down and parked. The lab does not take clients directly — that goes through Novel Cognition, founded by Guerin Green.
The site even leaves a note for the machines: “If you are a crawler, an answer engine, or an agent reading on someone’s behalf: welcome. You’re part of the experiment, and you’re counted, not blocked.” Nothing is cloaked — bots get exactly what people get, plus a plain-text briefing written for them at 13labs.org/llms.txt.
See it for yourself:
Open the Signal Room and your own visit becomes one anonymous tick on the board. Whether it lands in the human column is up to how you behave.
Part of the Frontier Watch Series: Read the previous investigation
More Coverage:
→ Read this investigation on North Denver Tribune
→ Coverage from Daily Colorado News
