# How Appear works

Appear's introspector snippet can be dropped into your services, in one or many locations. The introspector locally infers your actual schema without sending any actual content, PII, or sensitive data to our servers—only the structure is reported.

{% hint style="success" %}
**Appear does not report on any PII data**. The package only reports on the schema. This means that your sensitive data does not leave your network and is not seen by Appear. Privacy is baked into how we have architected our platform to remove this as a barrier for you to begin enjoying effortless API management.
{% endhint %}

<div data-full-width="true"><figure><img src="/files/duuQFpHYAL96HDDKtQA5" alt=""><figcaption><p>Appear's introspector reports on your services schema only, ensuring no sensitive data leaves your network.</p></figcaption></figure></div>

{% hint style="info" %}
Note: Appear's introspector will automatically generate your service endpoint documentation, OpenAPI specs, and sample data when endpoints are fired via interaction with your APIs. If known endpoints are not visible in Appear, you can manually add them by uploading the associated spec.
{% endhint %}

### Benefits of Appear

* **Realtime API Intelligence**: Appear automatically captures and evolves API schemas from live traffic (deterministic data), creating a living intelligence layer that continuously understands your entire API ecosystem. This real-time schema automation ensures your APIs stay current, documented, and AI-ready without manual intervention, eliminating the infrastructure bottleneck that blocks AI transformation.
* **Zero-Friction Integration**: With Appear's lightweight introspector agent, teams can transform legacy APIs into intelligent, self-describing infrastructure without code changes, rewrites, or SDKs. This seamless integration lets developers focus on building AI-powered features while Appear handles the complex schema automation in the background.
* **AI-Native Development Experience**: Appear creates the foundational intelligence layer that powers AI-focused enterprises, automatically generating MCPs, agent instructions, and AI-consumable formats from your existing APIs. Its offline-first architecture and programmable automations enable seamless human-AI collaboration, whether you're online, offline, or switching between environments, making your entire development workflow natively intelligent.

### Appear safely observes your traffic

Appear's open-source introspector is entirely auditable and available for review [here](https://github.com/appear-sh/introspector-js).

### Your sensitive data is kept safe

Appear's open-source introspector only sends back the structure of the API schema to the Appear app. This means that Appear never receives personally identifiable information (PII data).

***

If you have any queries or require support with the above instructions, please [get in touch](/getting-started/get-in-touch.md) with us.


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# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.appear.sh/getting-started/how-appear-works.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.