Method: what was counted and what was not

3,174 phrasings recorded across three mining passes in July 2026, held in three version-controlled documents in The Archivist Method's repository. Each phrasing is a plain-language sentence a person types or says about a behavior they have caught themselves repeating, recorded before they know the pattern has a name.

Nobody measured how many people typed anything. No number in this report counts searches, people, frequencies, or trends. A sentence of the form "N people search for X" cannot be built from this data, and this report does not contain one. Where this report says 141 or 43 or 268, it is counting recorded phrasings, nothing else.

Every quoted phrasing in this report carries one of two labels, and the difference is never blurred:

Every figure is labeled at source as either STATED, the mining document's own count with a file-and-line receipt, or RECOUNTED, reproduced mechanically by script in August 2026. The third mining pass reproduces exactly, every one of its eighteen cells and all three of its quarantine mark counts. The corpus's canonical total is 3,174 as stated by the mining documents; the independently reproduced mechanical floor is 2,837 register-line phrasings, and the two findings in this report that derive from the mechanical floor, the scenes-and-labels split and the vault, use the floor and say so.

The recount surfaced three gaps between stated and mechanical numbers, all recorded, none silent:

Scenes and labels are classified by mining register, the corpus's own organizing unit, not by per-phrasing judgment: scene registers are situation, body, night, paradox, aftermath and crisis-adjacent; label registers are vernacular, misfiled label and diagnostic; behavior questions (cause, action, spoken) are counted as neither and shown in the receipt. Individual phrasings inside a register vary, and the ratio is exact about registers, not about every phrasing.

Nothing marked as typed after the event, typed in present distress, or naming a diagnosis appears in this report, in any form, under the quarantine recorded in the corpus itself. Whole territories are permanently excluded by standing ruling, including symptom-checking, substance territory, and compensatory exercise. Active self-harm territory is absent from the corpus itself by construction: the miners refused to record it, and a person searching those words needs a crisis service in the first result, not a pattern file.

Every "what it means" passage in this report is written to one bar: readable by a stressed non-technical reader at one in the morning, no term left standing that the reader would have to look up, no comfort that is not also accurate.

Quoted searcher phrasings may contain vocabulary The Archivist Method never uses in its own voice. They appear under a scoped, founder-ruled extension of the archive's quoted-searcher-phrasing exemption, recorded in the repository's language law on 2026-08-22: the report quotes the searcher and answers in the archive's own vocabulary, never quotes a diagnosis, and never quotes the vault.

This report derives from docs/report/REPORT-2026-ANALYSIS.md at repository commit d8ae1c43, which cites the three corpus documents by path and line for every figure: docs/seo/PATTERN-PAGE-CLUSTERS.md, docs/seo/PATTERN-PAGE-CLUSTERS-HARVEST-2.md, docs/seo/PATTERN-PAGE-CLUSTERS-HARVEST-3.md. The analysis, the rulings, and this report are in version control; every number in this report can be walked back to a file, a line, and a date.