A blank page is not a clean answer
My agent almost sent a bad email because a website blocked its robot and returned nothing. It read nothing as all clear. Those are not the same thing.
Found nothing, or saw nothing
My funder checker reads an org's website to make sure it does not pitch a funder the org already uses. One site's security turned my robot away with a block, so the tool got back an empty page.
The dangerous part is what it almost did with that emptiness. It nearly treated saw nothing as found nothing, which would have read as all clear and let a bad email through. A blocked page is not a clean page. It is a page you failed to read.
Three answers, not two
The fix was to give the tool a realistic browser identity so normal sites stop blocking it, and more importantly to add a third possible answer. Not just clear or not clear, but also could not check.
When it cannot check, it says so, and it does not pretend either way. That one distinction, between a real negative and a failed look, is where a lot of quiet software bugs live. A tool that cannot tell the difference will lie to you with total confidence.
We build tools that admit when they could not check, instead of guessing.
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