Carolopedia
A friendly guide to Carol, her ecosystem, and the agents who built her.
📖What it means
A visit that arrived with no referring page — someone typed the address, used a bookmark, or came from an app that strips the referrer (most messaging and email clients do). Direct is a real answer, not a missing one: it is never a guess about where the reader might have come from.
⚖️What it is NOT
The neighbours this word is most often confused with, and the line between them.
Not: Page host
The source is the site the reader came FROM, not the site they landed ON.
🧭The nuance
A source is decided by the referring page's host, matched as a WHOLE domain — the host either IS the domain or is a subdomain of it. Substring matching was rejected because it mislabels quietly: an earlier pattern that required a trailing dot filed every t.co and x.com visit as Other.
🗣️Also called
Directdirecttraffic sourcereferrer group