I personally know them as synthetic tests. They are generally tests you run at a cadence against your live, production site.

Most services offer both:

- “API” where they can just send a basic GET request and assert the response is 2xx (we use these for our main api endpoint)

- “Browser” tests, which is more like Playwright in that it’s an actual browser (albeit usually headless) - we run these against our main homepage and assert some important pieces of text are present (in other words, checking we didn’t push a broken bundle or something).

Browser tests usually cost more by about a magnitude because they cost drastically more compute (still not THAT much, but it’s expensive at scale).