What we’ve decided.

A click is fraud or it is not. Every other tool in this category returns a probability and asks you where to draw the line — which is a vendor offering you a degree of fraud, handing you the hardest part of their job, and quietly turning their uncertainty into your liability. There is no degree of fraud Metaphasic calls acceptable.

We make the call. We are accountable for it. There is no score to interpret and no threshold to tune.

A status tells you whether a click came from a real person, without contradiction. That is a finding — valid or invalid, with the reason named. Decided, not guessed at.

Intent tells you something else: how strongly we believe that real person meant to act. That is a belief. Sold as one number, the two become a single hedge. And when you are made to defend a hedge, you are defending the vendor’s arithmetic instead of a fact.

An intent score is a belief, from 1 to 10, that a real click meant to act. It earns that belief by watching your traffic — not the industry’s, yours — and it sharpens as it sees more of it.

We could hand you a number on day one. It would be a guess dressed up as a reading, and we do not publish guesses. Intent turns on in your account once it is calibrated on your traffic, and not before. It is the only thing we sell that we will not sell you on day one.

In performance marketing, being right is not the same as being able to prove it. A “risk score” of 73 loses the conversation with your partner, and everyone who has had that conversation knows exactly how it ends.

Every verdict carries the signals behind it, timestamped and exportable for twelve months, so a clawback is a document rather than an argument.

Everyone in this category quotes one. They are all within a decimal place of each other, none can be audited, and nobody believes any of them. It is the cheapest claim available to us and the easiest sale in the category, and we are not making it.

An accuracy figure you cannot check is decoration. Run your own traffic through ours instead — you already know which of your sources you would defend and which you would quietly drop, and that makes you the only qualified judge of whether we told them apart.

You shouldn’t have to book a call to learn what something costs, or find out later that the company next to you was quoted differently. It costs us the room to charge a large buyer more, which is exactly what makes it worth publishing.

The conviction that stops us shipping a slider is the same one that stops us negotiating a price.