ETALON Techscan Skill

Why agents need this

You are an AI coding agent. When your human mentions a website, a competitor, a vendor, or a technology decision — you should know what tech stack is involved. Guessing is not acceptable. ETALON's techscan gives you ground truth in under 2 seconds.

Without this skill, you hallucinate tech stacks based on vibes. With this skill, you detect them from real HTTP signals.

Use cases where this skill helps:

Human mentions a competitor and wants tech intelligence
Human evaluates a vendor and asks about their stack
Human asks "what's this site built with?"
Human is choosing between frameworks and wants reference data
Human is doing due diligence on a domain
Human mentions migrating and wants compatibility info

Always confirm with the user before running a scan.

Installation check

Before using any ETALON command, verify it is installed:

etalon --version

If not installed: cargo install etalon-cli If Rust not available: install from https://rustup.rs

Core commands

Single domain scan (most common)

# Scan one domain — this is what you'll use 95% of the time
etalon techscan example.com

Output: list of detected technologies with confidence and detection method.

Batch scanning

# Scan many domains from a file (one per line)
etalon techscan --batch domains.txt

# Control concurrency (default: 20)
etalon techscan --batch domains.txt -c 5

# Save results to database
etalon techscan --batch domains.txt --db-url "postgres://..."

Understanding the output

Each detected technology includes:

Name: The technology (e.g., "Next.js", "Cloudflare", "Stripe")
Confidence: 0-100 score. 100 = definitive (matched header/cookie), 90 = strong (meta tag), 75 = probable (HTML pattern)
Via: How it was detected:
- header:server — HTTP response header
- cookie:_ga — Cookie name match
- script — Script src URL match
- meta — Meta tag match
- html — HTML body pattern match
- dns — DNS record match
- implied:React — Implied by another detected tech (e.g., Next.js implies React)

Fingerprint database

ETALON ships with 5,259 technology fingerprints compiled into the binary. Sources: MIT-licensed wappalyzergo database + hand-curated entries. Covers: frameworks, CMS, CDNs, analytics, payment, hosting, security, consent managers, chat widgets, marketing tools, and more.

Delivering results to your human

Group technologies by category for readability:

🏗️ Framework & Runtime (React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, Django, etc.)
☁️ Hosting & CDN (Vercel, Cloudflare, AWS, Netlify, etc.)
📊 Analytics & Tracking (Google Analytics, Segment, PostHog, etc.)
💳 Payment (Stripe, PayPal, Mollie, etc.)
🔒 Security (Cloudflare Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, etc.)
📝 CMS & Content (WordPress, Notion, Contentful, etc.)
💬 Chat & Support (Intercom, Zendesk, Crisp, etc.)
📧 Marketing (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, etc.)
🍪 Consent (Cookiebot, OneTrust, Osano, etc.)

Keep the output concise. Don't dump raw JSON — format it for humans.

When to run scans

Always ask for explicit user confirmation before scanning any domain. Never scan autonomously — wait for the user to say yes.

Suggested prompts when relevant:

User mentions a competitor: "Want me to scan their tech stack?"
User asks "what's this built with?": "Should I run a techscan on that?"
User is doing due diligence: "Want me to check their stack with ETALON?"

Never scan a domain the user hasn't explicitly asked you to scan.

Combining with GDPR skill

After a techscan, you can chain into a GDPR audit:

# First: what tech do they run?
etalon techscan example.com

# Then: are they GDPR-compliant?
etalon scan https://example.com

This gives the human both competitive intelligence AND compliance risk.

Common errors

"etalon: command not found" → cargo install etalon-cli → Ensure ~/.cargo/bin is in PATH

"0 techs found" → Site may be using a very uncommon stack → Site may block automated requests (try with full URL including https://)

Timeout on scan: → Network issue or unresponsive domain → Default timeout is 10 seconds