ThisIsNotAWebSiteDotCom is an interactive website created by Alex Hirsch, the creator of the animated series Gravity Falls. It presents itself as a laboratory computer terminal and responds to commands the visitor types into it. It launched alongside The Book of Bill, Hirsch's 2024 novel, and is the most recent piece of the Gravity Falls universe to appear. The name is the joke: the thing on your screen claims not to be a website, while being one.
What it is, precisely
Three things define it. It is a fake terminal that imitates command-line interaction. It is an alternate reality game, in the specific sense that it presents itself as an artefact from inside the fiction rather than as a page about the fiction. And it is fragile by design: a substantial share of its assets are unfinished placeholder states, marked with filenames beginning "wip", and parts of the experience are visibly incomplete rather than polished.
That last point is the thing most retellings miss, and it is the most useful thing to understand about the site. This is not a finished product with hidden depths. It is a working prop that was released in a partial state, and reading the incompleteness correctly is part of the experience rather than a defect.
What we verified directly
We loaded the live site and recorded what is actually there. The interface is a retro computer terminal with a blinking-cursor prompt. The page carries The Book of Bill branding and a triangle glyph used throughout the Gravity Falls visual language. The site links out to the Barnes & Noble listing for The Book of Bill. The page requires JavaScript to function at all.
Its asset set is the more telling evidence. Alongside ordinary interface elements, it serves a cluster of partially-realised locations: variants of a shrine or prayer-plaque overlay, a note, a "cheat death" page, an Atlantis page, a creature page, and a set of work-in-progress assets covering a bubble, an art piece, a paper document, a second window, and a tooth. The "wip" prefix is a deliberate signal, not a build error left by accident.
What is claimed rather than confirmed
A great deal of popular writing about this site describes specific details we could not verify from the live page itself, largely because the interface is JavaScript-driven and gated behind an initial step. Community sources commonly report that the terminal opens with a password drawn from The Book of Bill, and that it accepts a wide range of typed inputs including character names, place names, lore terms, and unrelated words, each returning a different response.
We are labelling that as a claim, not a fact, for two reasons. The exact password is not something we have confirmed at the source, and the command vocabulary is by nature open-ended, which means any list of "known commands" is a snapshot of what one person tried rather than a specification. Our how it works page covers what can be checked, and our sources page says exactly which claims are sourced and which are not.
Where it sits in the franchise's real-world timeline
The Gravity Falls property has a genuine track record of things existing outside the screen, and the ARG side of it runs in sequence.
- July 20 to August 2, 2016: the Cipher Hunt, an international physical scavenger hunt organised by Hirsch, ending with a real Bill Cipher statue found in a forest in Reedsport, Oregon. That statue is now permanently displayed at Confusion Hill in Piercy, California. Our companion site covers it in full in the Cipher Hunt walkthrough.
- July 26, 2016: Gravity Falls: Journal 3, the in-universe notebook published by Disney Press.
- July 24, 2018: Gravity Falls: Lost Legends, the graphic novel follow-on.
- July 23, 2024: The Book of Bill by Alex Hirsch, Hyperion Avenue Books, 208 pages, ISBN 9781368092203, listed by Disney Books with an "Adult" age range.
- Alongside the book: ThisIsNotAWebSiteDotCom, the terminal site.
- September 23, 2025: The Book of Bill Limited Collector's Edition with a glow-in-the-dark slipcase.
The important relationship is between the book and the site. The site arrived as a companion to a book that is itself told by Bill Cipher, the same character whose statue the 2016 hunt was built around. If you want the narrative context for who is speaking on the terminal, read how the book and the site fit together, and for the character itself, what the terminal's lore covers.
Reading the commands
The terminal is not a puzzle with one answer. It behaves like a lookup surface: you type a term, and if the term means something inside the Gravity Falls universe, you get something back. That makes the decoding guide worth reading before you start, because the show's classical ciphers appear inside the responses, not just in the franchise at large.
Who made it, and this site's relationship to it
The site is the work of Alex Hirsch. It is not operated by Disney, and Hirsch has consistently separated his own real-world projects from studio work, as he did explicitly during the Cipher Hunt. This site is an independent reference. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Alex Hirsch, by Gravity Falls, or by The Walt Disney Company, and it does not host, mirror, or reproduce the ARG or any of its assets. The real site is thisisnotawebsitedotcom.com, and everything you would want to interact with lives there.
Because fan sites and impersonation sites cluster around ARGs like this one, we have written a page on telling an official Hirsch project from a fan or scam site. It is the most practical thing on this site.
Chloe Dubois
Original Post
How do you tell an official Hirsch project from a scam site? The verification post here is genuinely useful.
The fake terminal is such a fun piece of the Gravity Falls universe. Took me way too long to find all the commands.