Ad-access survey adds its own search methods, now covers 342 industries

FORT MILL, S.C. - Sept. 7, 2026 - PRLog -- Ichnos, a survey of where restricted industries can still legitimately advertise, has expanded to 342 categories and more than 50,000 destinations, and now searches each industry using 20 distinct methods — several of which the system identified for itself.

The survey covers industries the major advertising platforms refuse outright or that a regulator restricts: licensed dispensaries, firearms retailers, bail bonds agencies, ketamine clinics, payday lenders, medical spas and hundreds more. For each, Ichnos reads the destination's own published advertising or submissions policy and records whether outside businesses may take part — quoting the sentence that says so.

Of more than 50,000 destinations examined, just over five percent state whether an outsider may take part at all. Only nine published an outright refusal.

"The doors are mostly unmarked rather than locked," said David A. Thompson, founder of KnightByrd Tech LLC. "Operators assume they are shut out everywhere, because the two channels every other business starts with are closed to them. What the reading shows is that almost nobody actually says no. They just never say anything, and an unmarked door is indistinguishable from a locked one until somebody reads the page."

A second finding concerns the shape of the access that exists. Across the survey, 1,253 destinations sell advertising, 841 are open through membership and 797 sell event presence, against 355 that accept contributed articles. Guest posting — the thing most operators search for — accounts for roughly ten percent of available access, while paid advertising accounts for thirty-five.

The 20 methods are each scored on how many of the destinations they find turn out, on reading, to publish a documented way in. The best of them is more than twenty times more productive than the worst. Methods that stop producing receive less of each run; none is retired entirely. The system also proposes new methods by examining destinations it found without looking for them. One such method, covering international and cross-border trade federations, was added this month and has produced more than 3,000 additional destinations across industries already surveyed without it.

The methods themselves are not published. The count is.

Ichnos does not submit anything on a user's behalf, does not classify a destination as open without reading its page, and does not sell contact details. The survey is at https://nexus.knightbyrd.com/ichnos and aggregate counts are free at https://kema.knightbyrd.com/api/public/ichnos

KnightByrd Tech LLC is an independent software company in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Every figure it publishes traces to a sentence on a destination's own public page.