An administrator at Meridian Electric Cooperative wants to guarantee that one specific vendor domain is always treated a certain way, independent of how FortiGuard's cloud rating service currently classifies it. Which web filter mechanism should the administrator use for that guarantee?

The static URL filter list exists precisely for cases where an administrator needs a guaranteed, stable outcome for a specific domain that shouldn't drift with FortiGuard's ongoing categorization. Because entries on that list are locally defined — as exact matches, wildcards, or regular expressions — and are evaluated ahead of FortiGuard category-based filtering, the configured action for that domain holds regardless of how FortiGuard's cloud rating for the site changes over time. The idea that FortiGuard ratings never change is the opposite of reality: FortiGuard periodically re-crawls and can re-categorize sites, which is exactly the instability the static list is meant to protect against for a domain that matters operationally. Application control is a different mechanism entirely — it identifies applications and protocols by signature, not by a domain entry on an administrator's list, so it doesn't provide this kind of guarantee for a URL. The video filter profile is scoped to video-site content categories and channels, not general web domains, so it wouldn't apply here at all. One caveat: a static URL filter entry only guarantees the outcome for traffic that actually reaches the web filter profile carrying that entry, so it must be applied on every policy the vendor traffic could traverse. Confirm coverage by checking the web filter log across all relevant policies for a hit on that entry.