Indicator Guides

How to investigate potential sockpuppets and manipulation on Wikipedia

The encyclopedia's public investigations and community tools provide useful leads for journalists and researchers

Workshop video: Finding hidden connections with digital ad data

No technical expertise required.

The Indicator Lab is live!

Everything you need to run investigations with AI.

Reddit OSINT: What still works for search, monitoring, and archives

Three years of restrictions broke many useful Reddit tools. Here's what you can still rely on.

The Indicator guide to investigating crypto transactions

How to triage an address, connect addresses to the same owner, and follow funds through the blockchain, using free tools.

The Indicator Guide to investigating digital ad supply chains

How to use DecryptAds and urlscan.io to map ad relationships, identify likely site owners, and find where ads have run.

8 mistakes people make when prompting AI — and how to fix them

Advice from analyzing 522,607 questions people asked chatbots

12 free tools for monitoring webpages and keywords

What each tool does for free, which ones are worth your time, and how to monitor a site without the owner noticing.

The Indicator guide to vibecoding for OSINT

How investigators with no coding skills use AI to build tools for their own work.

How to red team an AI tool for safety

Indicator’s no-code and product-agnostic guide to probing for harmful stuff

I run a due diligence investigations firm and this is where AI is (and isn’t) useful

Five ways AI helps investigative research, what it gets wrong, and why it won't replace your judgment.

The Indicator Framework: How to tell what your digital evidence is actually worth

A repeatable method for weighing the indicators in an OSINT investigation and telling the genuine leads from the fakes, the dead ends, and the merely common.

No code, no budget: 7 web scrapers put to the test

Scraping no longer demands coding skills or a big budget. Here's how seven options held up across three real-world tests.

Workshop video: Using AI to investigate a North Korean hiring scam

Plus: how to connect an LLM to Obsidian for investigative work

Get your machine set up for OSINT

The free apps, browser extensions, and OPSEC tools investigators install first.

Workshop video: AI skills for investigators

The Indicator Guide to Using Skills in Chrome for OSINT

Three ready-to-install browser prompts for analyzing social media profiles, extracting entities from webpages, and assessing images — plus how to build your own.

Earth Index: A step-by-step guide to searching satellite imagery with AI

How to set up a project, label samples, and search for matching structures and landscape features across the planet.

19 free tools you can use to investigate a URL

Tools and techniques for digging into links, redirects, parameters, and more.

Finding the real owner of a company: a guide to beneficial ownership in the EU, UK, and beyond

2026 could be a turning point for universal beneficial ownership data. Here's what investigators need to know.

The Indicator Guide to building your own reverse image search engine

Step-by-step instructions for how to index a private dataset of images (or videos) and run reverse image search queries against it.

The Indicator guide to investigating ecommerce sites

A practical walkthrough of the tools, techniques, and indicators used to analyze online stores and identify ecommerce fraud operations.

The Indicator Guide to using Telegram in digital investigations

Telegram has become a top source for documenting global conflicts — and so much more. Here's how to use it for investigations.

The Indicator Guide to hunting for documents and files in open buckets, servers, and directories

How to find interesting and potentially confidential documents sitting on a publicly-accessible server or website

The Indicator Guide to investigating digital ad libraries

Ad repositories can help with backgrounding people and companies, and with investigating influence and disinformation campaigns