Punchline vs Fathom
Fathom blocks the agents. We read their work.
Fathom and Punchline both keep cookies off your visitors' devices. Fathom blocks bots, including AI scrapers, and shows you a count. Punchline shows you each agent, what it read, and what happened next.
See your whole funnelFree for a week, alongside your current analytics. No cookies, no banner.
Side by side
| Punchline | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|
| AI agents and crawlers | Sees them and labels each one: crawler, agent reading for a person, fetcher or impostor, with its operator. Concepts | Blocked by default: a list of known bot and crawler user agents (including AI scrapers), data-center IP ranges, and requests with no user agent.[1] |
| What you see of them | Every label lists the rules that fired and how sure it is (verified, declared, inferred). How it works | A count of blocked requests for the date range, broken down by data-center IP, bot user agent and empty user agent. Since September 2026, blocking can be switched off per site.[2] |
| Cookies | None. Nothing is stored on visitors' devices; IP addresses and user agents are used in memory and discarded. Privacy | None.[3] |
| Agents that never run JavaScript | Yes, with an edge install (Next.js or Cloudflare): agents that never run JavaScript are counted. | We couldn't find this in its documentation. |
| Companies researching you | Accounts: which companies' agents researched you, by intent, pushed to HubSpot or Salesforce. Accounts | We couldn't find this in its documentation. |
| Serving agents better | Can serve AI assistants a markdown version of your pages from the edge. Serve agents markdown | We couldn't find this in its documentation. |
What we say about Fathom comes from its own published material, checked October 2026. Products change: if something here is out of date, tell us at hey@opsscale.co and we'll fix it.
Where Fathom is strong
Credit where it's due
- A clean, simple dashboard, quick to set up.
- Cookieless by design, with privacy at the center of the product.
- Transparent bot counts, and a switch for when a proxy makes real visitors look like bots.
Using both
Punchline next to Fathom
Fathom's bot count tells you how much was removed; Punchline tells you who it was. Run them side by side to see what Fathom's blocked traffic was reading.