Signatures

A signature is a piece of code that a product leaves on every website that uses it: the address its script loads from, the id of its widget, the folder of its plugin. Search for the signature and you find the product's customers. Search for the product's name and you find everyone who mentions it.

Why code, not the name

A product's name turns up in reviews, comparisons, partner lists, agency portfolios, job ads and blog posts - pages that talk about the product rather than run it. Other companies may share the name, too. The code a customer installs is not on those pages, so a query for it finds the customers and little else.

Step by step

1. Search for the product's domain, in quotes, and look at the code around each match. The results page shows it under each site; through the API or the MCP server, ask for snippets.
2. Read that code on the sites that are clearly customers. Skip the product's own site, review sites and agencies. Note what repeats from one customer to the next: a script or CDN address, an element id, a plugin folder, a link to a page on the product's domain. Take the traces from the code you see, not from memory: a path that looks right but is guessed often finds nothing, or something else.
3. Put what repeats into one query: each trace as an exact phrase in quotes, joined with |.
4. Run the query and check it: read the code of the results at the end of the list as well as at the start, remove what does not belong, and know what the count means. Checking a signature goes through it.

A good signature

• It is code, not a name. A script address with its path, an element id, the name of a setting or a function. The product's bare domain is where the search starts, not the signature: it also matches links to the product, its help pages and articles about it.
• It was seen, not guessed - in the code of sites that use the product.
• It has been run. Its count is known, and the code under its results, at the start of the list and at the end, is the product's.

Other places to find the code

• The product's help pages. Instructions such as "add the widget to your website" show the exact code customers paste in.
• A customer's page source. Open a site you know uses the product, view its source and look for the product's name or domain.
• The browser's developer tools. On the Network tab, filter by the product's name: it lists every script, frame and image the page loads from the product.

Whatever you find, test it with a search: a trace that looked unique may be common, and a product may load from more than one address.

In detail

• Where products leave traces - the kinds of code worth searching for, each with an example.
• Checking a signature - noise, namesakes, the end of the list, and what the count means.

Ready-made signatures for many products are in Usage examples.