Impossible with source code, possible to bypass with app/site

Don't we already do this with services like Let's Encrypt, which is arguably more sensitive? If you had the codebase you could fake it, but it would still provide some amount of protection against abuse.

With Let's Encrypt, all the verification is done on their side with them controlling the connection between themselves and whatever they're trying to verify.

In this case, you can put whatever you want between the harness you're running (or modify the harness itself), and essentially "lie" to the model. Any verification technique would be fairly trivial to bypass, while you continue to run the harness locally.