# 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 funnel](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/reveal)

## 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](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/docs/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](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/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](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/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](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/docs/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](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/docs/edge-markdown) | We couldn't find this in its documentation. |

Claims about Fathom are from its own published material, checked October 2026:

1. [Fathom Analytics docs: Bot detection](https://usefathom.com/docs/features/bot-detection)
2. [Fathom Analytics: September 2026 updates](https://usefathom.com/changelog/sep2026-general-updates)
3. [Fathom Analytics: Cookieless analytics](https://usefathom.com/why-fathom-analytics/cookieless-analytics)

## 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.

## 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.

[See what your analytics is missing](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/reveal)