My site-indexation checker passed once, then failed 8 times in a row. Same query, same minute.

Short summary

A developer's site-indexation checker for an iOS side project proved fundamentally unreliable: datacenter egress IPs get blocked by Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Mojeek, with Bing silently returning wrong results. Adding a control query (known-good answer) fixed correctness but revealed the tool only works ~10% of the time due to aggressive rate limiting. The key lesson: validating correctness is not the same as validating reliability, and a control gate that fires first can consume the only available query budget.

• •Datacenter IPs are blocked by all major search engines, making automated site: queries unreliable
• •Bing silently returns HTTP 200 with wrong results, which is more dangerous than a hard block
• •Control-validated checks are correct but only pass ~10% of the time due to rate limits, so reliability must be measured separately from correctness

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.