Glossary

Each term has this meaning everywhere: in these pages, in what the command prints and in the dashboard.

Term	Meaning
account	Your app’s own id for a user, linked to visitors with identify. Stable and non-personal: a record id, never an email address.
act	A change made with the command, live within about 2 minutes without a deploy: pause, resume, promote, retire, revert or set.
address	The name of a page, slot, variant or version: home, home/hero, home/hero:oneclick, home/hero:oneclick@v2.
arrival	A visit’s entry into your site from outside, such as from a search or a link. sources counts arrivals.
channel	The kind of source an arrival came from, as sources reports it: search, direct, referral, email, social, ai, paid, other or unknown.
control	The 10% of visitors who always see the defaults, so that what routing adds can be measured.
conversion	An occurrence of the objective, or of a tracked outcome, credited to a visit.
counted	A figure that records what happened, such as visits, conversions, rates or revenue. It is exact.
default	The variant a slot shows today, and the one the control always sees. Every slot has one.
deploy	Your site’s usual deploy. What it changed is registered by your build, or, on a site decided in the page, by npx routingcat push, run after the deploy; on a site whose templates carry its slots, npx routingcat push first stamps them. A production deploy makes changes live; a preview deploy records new versions and changes nothing live.
difference from the default	How a variant’s predicted rate compares with its slot’s default, relative and in points, each with a 95% range. The JSON names it contrast_with_default.
drift	A place where what is live differs from your code, after an act.
era	The time since a page’s defaults last changed by a promote. The measured gain is kept per era and summed.
event	What track reports: a name, an id, a time, and optionally a value.
fixed share	Part of a slot’s routed visits split evenly, or by declared weights, with each visitor kept on the same variant across visits. At 1, it is a classic A/B test.
floor, cap	Limits you can set on a variant’s share of a slot’s routed visits.
head partial	On a site whose templates carry its slots, the file of RoutingCat’s scripts, with your public key, that every page includes first in its <head>. npx routingcat push writes it: never edit it, but to give its script tags your page’s nonce, which push keeps.
head snippet	RoutingCat’s small inline script, first in a page’s <head>, which shows the variants picked for the visitor before the page paints, on a page that carries every variant of its slots.
held	Said of a variant past Hobby’s 10 live variants across the owner’s sites, the slots’ defaults not counted: registered and kept, and not served until room frees or the owner moves to Pro.
Hobby, Pro	The plans of a RoutingCat account, each covering every site its owner holds. Hobby is free, up to 3 sites sharing 10,000 visitors a month and 10 live variants; Pro is paid, by the month or the year, and includes more of both, with any number of sites; Stripe takes the payments. A Shopify store’s plans have the same names, are both paid, and are billed by Shopify every 30 days, for the store’s site alone.
incomplete	A rate over all visits so far, including visits whose window is still open. It reads low.
kind of visitor	A group of visitors that routing can tell apart and learn about separately.
label	What routing is doing with a variant now, as status prints it: favored, learning or prior, and capped or floor-supported when a cap or a floor holds its share. Never a verdict.
matured	Said of a visit whose window has closed, so that its outcome is known.
measured	Said of a figure from a randomized comparison, as the command prints it: routed visits against the control, or a fixed share’s even split.
measured gain	The extra conversions a page’s routed visits produced, compared with showing everyone the defaults, with a 95% range. It is measured against the control, and it is the only figure that counts as a gain.
message	A warning or error with an id, such as D14, explained in the messages reference.
middleware	RoutingCat’s code that runs before your pages on Vercel, in your root middleware.ts, or on Cloudflare Pages, in a static site’s functions/_middleware.ts, and picks each visitor’s variants before the page is served. On a Hydrogen storefront, routingcatMiddleware, in the root route, hands each loader the decision your Worker made.
objective	The main conversion that routing learns to get more of on a page, such as signup. A page has one, and it counts at most once per visit, within its window.
outcome	An event tracked beside the objective, such as purchase. It is counted and reported, and never steers routing.
page	A page of your site that RoutingCat can vary, declared in a file in routingcat/, or, on a site whose templates carry its slots, in routingcat.config.json and the slot markup.
pause, resume	Stop serving a variant, and serve it again. A pause lasts until resume, through every deploy.
personalization	Routing that learns which variant works best for each kind of visitor. On by default for each slot.
predicted	Said of a figure from the model: a predicted rate, a difference from the default, signal or a label. It comes with a 95% range and moves as evidence arrives.
predicted rate	The model’s estimate of a variant’s conversion rate on the page’s recent traffic. Also called its score.
preview link	A signed link, valid for one hour, that shows a variant in production without counting in results.
promote	Make a variant its slot’s default, so the control sees it too. The measured gain so far is kept.
proxy	On Next.js, RoutingCat’s code in your proxy.ts, which picks each visitor’s variants before the page renders.
publication	A recorded state of what a page serves. Each production deploy or act that changes it creates one; on a site decided in the page, the production push after the deploy does.
pulse	The live count of arrivals, decisions and events over the last hour, which shows the install is alive. It is not a result.
random slice	A share of routed visits, 5% by default, whose variants are drawn evenly whatever the model thinks.
range	A 95% interval: the values the evidence supports. A range that spans zero means the direction isn’t known yet.
render beacon	The browser’s report, once a page shows, of what each slot rendered.
retire, revert	Stop a variant for good, keeping its history; return a page to what it served before.
routed visit	A visit outside the control, whose variants routing chooses. The random slice is included.
RoutingCat	The product. Code and commands spell it routingcat.
RoutingCat account	You, as you sign in to RoutingCat. Your plan, the sites you own and, unless Shopify bills your store, your card are your RoutingCat account’s; not the account your app links visitors to.
scorecard	A comparison opened when a change goes live: a new variant against its slot’s default, or an edited variant’s new version against the version it replaced. The JSON names its difference lift_vs_comparator.
signal	How much evidence backs a variant’s predicted rate, from 0 to 100, labeled New, Early, Building or Strong. Not a probability of winning.
slot	A place on a page that can change, such as the headline. Slots vary independently.
slot markup	A slot as HTML: a container naming its page and slot, around every variant, the default shown and the others hidden until RoutingCat shows each visitor theirs. On a site whose templates carry its slots, you write it in them.
tracking gap	A period you record when an outcome wasn’t tracked, so that its visits count as unknown rather than as no conversion.
variant	One alternative for a slot.
version	One state of a variant’s content. Each change to that content in code makes a new version, written @v2, and every version is kept.
visit	A visitor’s window, 7 days by default, from the first time they reach a routed page. RoutingCat counts in visits.
visitor	A browser, known by its rc_vid cookie. Not a person: one person on two devices is two visitors until identify links both to one account. On a site decided in the page, RoutingCat’s script writes the cookie, which Safari deletes after 7 days without a visit, unless your server sets it.
window	How long after a visitor first sees a page a conversion still counts for it: 24 hours by default, never past the end of the visit.
Worker	RoutingCat’s code in a Cloudflare Worker in front of your site, or in a Hydrogen storefront’s Oxygen Worker, which picks each visitor’s variants before the page is served and forwards browsers’ reports from /_rc to RoutingCat.