Most EA records you will see are backtests uploaded by the vendor: a Strategy Tester report, exported and displayed as evidence. Karnek accepts none of them, from anyone, and Otto shows its own backtest only under conditions this page explains.
An uploaded backtest is a document the vendor produced. Its data, its spread, its period, its parameters and its tick model were all chosen by the person whose product it supports, and the report shows none of those choices unless the vendor decides to. The same strategy can be made to show a 30 per cent year or a 5 per cent year by changing the spread assumption alone. There is no way for a reader to tell which they are looking at, and there is no way for a service that hosts the upload to verify it, because there is nothing to verify: the report is the vendor's claim, restated.
That is why Karnek publishes only records it reads directly from a broker, and why Otto's live accounts are the evidence Otto asks to be judged on.
Otto's own backtest is on the site as context. It was run by Otto's developers, and the page says so. Its method is published in full: the data, the 17-year span, the fill rule, the costs, and the years withheld during development and tested once, at the end. None of that makes it independent, and it is labelled as a backtest wherever it appears, placed beneath the live record, and never used as a headline. It is there so that the live record can be compared with it, which is the subject of the next page, and for no other purpose.