The tool, called Sheep Dip, uses a blend of technical checks, red herring checks and verbatim checks to pre-clean data and remove fraudulent respondents before running research.

Features include using a combination of geolocation, browser fingerprinting, text analysis and statistical engineering to detect and eliminate fraudulent and automated respondents from panels.

In a blog announcing the launch of Sheep Dip, the company wrote: “Bad data, be that fake, bot, or just plain made up, is becoming ever-more prevalent in panel company data, requiring companies to spend an ever-increasing amount of post-survey time cleaning and re-fielding results.

“To us, the best response we can take as an industry isn’t better post–survey scrubbing. It’s better pre–survey prepping.”