Bots, LLM-written answers, click-farms and multi-accounting quietly corrupt online data. Testable fuses dozens of real-time signals into one score per participant — the Participant Authenticity Score (PAS)†. And Testable is the platform where you can both build the study and recruit participants directly — so when you do both with us, we see the whole thing, not a redirect boundary.
* We don’t quote a “100% detection” figure — nobody honestly can. What we promise instead is the vantage point: when you build your study on Testable, in-session capture is native — keystrokes, pastes, focus changes and DOM writes, with nothing to install and no third-party JavaScript to paste in. That’s the highest-protection setup, and it’s why we recommend it. Live recall and false-positive metrics are published in the methodology pack.
A layered pipeline. Each layer catches what the one before it can’t, and every probabilistic signal converges on a single server-side score. No individual check can decide alone — that’s what makes it hard to defeat.
A layer only runs when its colour is available to you. Two dots means it needs both. All eight light up together only when the study is built on Testable and recruits participants from Testable Minds — the setup we walk through under “Three ways to run a study”, below.
Verified Minds participants submit a government photo ID — checked for declared sex, date of birth, nationality, and issuing country — and face-matched to a live selfie at sign-up.
Before every study, a live face-authentication confirms the person starting the experiment is the same human on file. The match score feeds the PAS — identity bound to this session, not a re-check in some other app.
A sub-30-second pre-study scan hard-blocks known automation and pool-banned fingerprints before the participant reaches your stimuli.
Datacenter / VPN origins and modern JA4 / JA4H TLS fingerprints screened at the edge — non-browser clients never load the study.
Browser-automation and headless markers, tiered into hard-stop vs. suspicious across desktop and mobile.
Typing rhythm, pointer motion, paste and focus patterns, plus input-provenance — text that appears without a genuine keystroke is treated as injected, not typed. Touch kinematics on mobile.
Timing vs. reading time, accuracy, cross-participant answer similarity and free-text canaries flag AI-assisted and relayed answers. Where answers are spoken, the audio itself is a powerful tell.
Everything above becomes one weighted PAS with three action bands. We keep the full behavioural session — input, focus and pointer events, plus the participant’s spoken audio whenever you enable it — to replay and re-score as new evasion emerges. Borderline cases go to a person, with appeals and a full audit trail.
Layers 1–2 are live today; layers 3–8 are rolling out now and will be fully operational in August 2026.
You cannot detect what you cannot see. On Testable, you see everything — by default. Capturing what happens inside your study takes no setup: every keystroke, paste, focus change and DOM write is recorded natively, with no third-party JavaScript to copy into a survey and nothing to wire up, because the experiment runs on our page. And it’s built for real experiments, not just questionnaires and scales: reaction-time tasks, precise stimulus timing, interactive and multimedia designs all get the same full behavioural capture. Build your study with us and the complete picture is yours from the first click — the highest-protection setup, working the moment you hit go.
For any study with spoken or open-ended answers, you can record the participant’s audio for the whole session and review it yourself afterwards. Live human speech is one of the strongest authenticity signals there is: a bot can’t speak instantly (yet), and a person relaying an LLM gives themselves away — copying the question out, waiting for the model, then reading the answer back takes real, measurable time, and it sounds like reading, not answering. Both the latency and the voice land in the PAS. We recommend enabling it wherever your experimental design allows.
One number, 0–100, for every session. Use it to include, review, or weight — whatever your analysis calls for.
† The full PAS launches in August 2026; identity verification and per-study face-authentication are live today.
Band thresholds shown here are illustrative; the live cut-points are tuned per strictness level and kept proprietary.
Two things catch modern AI: a verified identity that persists across studies, and in-page behaviour where the answers are actually typed. They live in two different places — the participant pool and the study page. Every competitor owns one and rents the other. Testable is the platform that can own both. Here is exactly how coverage changes with your setup.
The complete picture — and no one else can copy it. Every layer is live — blue and pink — and reconciles to one verified participant: pool identity, per-study live face-authentication, cross-study reputation and permanent bans, plus the full in-page stream (keystroke, paste, input-provenance, mouse/touch, canaries, behavioural session recording). Catch a bad behaviour once and that person is banned from every future study, everywhere on Testable.
Full in-study protection — the blue layers. The study runs on us, so the entire behavioural and environment stack works — entry gate, JA4, keystroke / paste / injection, mouse / touch, timing, session recording — and produces a real PAS. What’s reduced: the person’s verified identity lives with the outside panel, so permanent bans are device-level, not person-level. And note the asymmetry: the external panel that supplied the participant sees nothing inside your study — in-study visibility stays exclusively ours.
Pool protection only — the pink layers, the box Prolific lives in by default. Your study runs on another platform, and browsers isolate pages from other websites (the same-origin policy) — so our telemetry cannot reach inside a survey hosted elsewhere. We keep verified identity, face-authentication at launch, reputation, bans and the launch/return boundary — but not one keystroke inside the survey. Want the complete picture? Build the study on Testable — it’s the best protection.
Tune strictness to your study. Tighter modes catch more automation at the cost of more manual review; looser modes minimise false exclusions.
Exact signal weights, live thresholds and the current bot-signature library stay private. Publishing them would hand a circumvention playbook to the operators we’re screening out — the same reason bank-fraud systems keep their internals closed.
Need to look under the hood for an audit? We’ll go deep with you under NDA.
We’re blunt about this because the marketing in our field has become fiction, and you’re the one who inherits the contaminated dataset when it turns out to be fiction.
Participant Authenticity is a data-minimising design with human oversight built in — and a permanent, cross-study ban network that makes fraud expensive to attempt.