Guest session
also known as: logged-out capture
A browser capture performed without signing in to the surface being captured, the default and, for most live surfaces today, the only mode. It is honestly labeled because a logged-in session can personalize an answer in ways a guest session never sees, and conflating the two would corrupt any comparison across captures.
In AI Search API
provenance.loginState records guest (logged_out) on every browser capture, so nothing downstream has to assume which mode produced an Envelope. Guest sessions are today’s live path for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and every Google surface; an authenticated account pool for surfaces that require sign-in is phase-2 roadmap, not a quiet stand-in served today under a guest label. When it ships, loginState will say so, the same field, a different honest value. Nothing about a guest capture is downgraded or partial: the full Envelope, the answer, its provenance and its structured evidence, is populated exactly as it would be for any other capture.
"provenance": { "loginState": "logged_out" }Related terms
See it in the product
Every definition here is enforced in the Envelope contract. Run a capture and read the fields yourself.