Published September 27, 2026
How This Is Not a Website Dot Com began, and what it launched with
The terminal ARG created by Alex Hirsch alongside The Book of Bill in July 2024, its launch context, and the design decisions that make it work.
The site usually called ThisIsNotAWebSiteDotCom is an interactive terminal created by Alex Hirsch and released alongside The Book of Bill in July 2024. It is the newest real-world artefact in the Gravity Falls universe and the second of its kind, after the 2016 Cipher Hunt. Understanding why it looks the way it does requires understanding the franchise's habit of putting puzzles in the physical world.
Launch context
The Book of Bill was released on July 23, 2024 by Hyperion Avenue Books, Disney's adult imprint, with 208 pages and ISBN 9781368092203, listed by Disney Books with an "Adult" age range. It was the first book in the franchise line not to carry "Gravity Falls" in the title, a decision made because the book targets an older audience than the series ever did. A Barnes & Noble exclusive edition with sixteen extra pages of production art shipped the same day.
The terminal arrived with it. The link is not incidental: the live site carries The Book of Bill branding and links directly to the Barnes & Noble listing, which is the clearest evidence that the site and the book are a single release rather than two separate announcements. Our book and site relationship page works through what that means for chronology and for who is speaking.
The design is the point
Three design decisions do the heavy lifting.
It denies what it is. The name is the premise. A website titled "This Is Not a Website" is doing something specific: it insists on being read as an object from inside the fiction rather than as a page about the fiction. That reframes your posture. You are not visiting a site, you are operating a machine.
It is visibly unfinished. A large share of the served assets carry a "wip" prefix, and several linked pages are stubs. Combined with overlay screens for a shrine-like plaque and a computer display, this produces a machine that looks like it is being reconstructed rather than one that is finished. Our reading is that this is intentional, and that a fully functional terminal would be a weaker artefact than one that visibly strains at its seams. The creator has consistently treated an incomplete, in-world machine as more unsettling than a complete one.
It is JavaScript-dependent, and slow. A text-only fetch returns almost nothing. Any description of the site based on a plain HTTP fetch is describing a page that no visitor sees, which is the most common reason published accounts of this ARG are wrong.
The second precedent: the Cipher Hunt
The 2016 Cipher Hunt is the reason the 2024 terminal is not a surprise. Hirsch organised an international physical scavenger hunt between July 20 and August 2, 2016, seeded by a few seconds of real-world footage of a stone statue in the finale. Thirteen locations across Russia, Japan, and the United States, five classical cipher methods, and a final Polybius-square decode of "REEDSPORTOR" led to a Bill Cipher statue found in a forest near Reedsport, Oregon. That statue is now permanently at Confusion Hill in Piercy, California, at roughly 39.919002N 123.764908W.
The pattern across both projects is identical: Hirsch builds something that is real, that operates on the viewer's actual behaviour, and that is documented afterward rather than explained in advance. Our companion site has the full Cipher Hunt walkthrough.
What came before both
The lineage reaches back into the series itself, where the journals and the end credits carried genuine, classical, solvable ciphers throughout all 40 episodes. A show built on a deciphering premise naturally produces a creator who thinks in ciphers, and Hirsch's own account of the production process, covered on how Gravity Falls was made, explains why the codes are solvable by design rather than as set dressing.
The decoding guide on this site is the practical next step if you have not opened the terminal yet.