Visitors

Your site’s Overview opens with a card called Visitors. Nothing switches it on and there is nothing to install: your site is counted as it is served.

The card shows the past month — how many pages were looked at, roughly how many people looked at them, a bar for each day, the pages people opened most, the sites they arrived from, and how many of them were on a phone. Where the month before it has enough traffic to compare against, it also shows whether you are up or down on it.

Where the numbers come from

Every page of your site is served by us, so every page that is served can be counted. There is no script on your pages, no cookie, no banner to click, and nothing is added to what a visitor downloads. Your pages are exactly what you published.

That also means an ad blocker cannot remove the count, which is the usual reason a small site’s own statistics look thinner than its traffic really is.

What is not counted

Robots. Search engines, link previewers and AI crawlers all fetch pages, and none of them is a reader. They are recognised by the name their software gives and left out of your views. AI crawlers are counted separately, as requests, on one line — worth knowing, and never mixed in with people.

Us. Our own checks fetch pages from your site to make sure it is being served correctly. They say who they are, and they are dropped for the same reason.

Anything that is not a page. A redirect, a missing page, your feed, your sitemap and the file a search engine reads for its rules are all left out. A view means somebody opened a page and got it.

“Visitors, approximately”, and why the word is there

Page views are exact: each one is a page somebody asked for.

Visitors are an estimate, because telling two people apart without following them around is not possible, and following them around is the thing this deliberately does not do. Two people in one house may count as one. One person who reads you on the sofa and again on the train counts as two. It is a good guide to whether more people are coming; it is not a headcount, and the card says so.

Nothing about any individual visitor is stored — not a name, not a profile, not a history. What is kept is counts.

Devices

Phones, tablets and computers are told apart by the description the browser sends about itself. It is what a browser volunteers, not something we look up, so it is occasionally wrong — a tablet asked to behave like a computer will be counted as one, because it is claiming to be one.

Freshness, and the first day

The count is gathered up once an hour, so the newest numbers can be up to an hour behind. The card says how far it has counted, in your site’s own timezone, which is also the timezone its days are drawn in: an evening’s traffic lands on that evening wherever your site is set.

Counting starts the day your site is first visited. It cannot show you anything from before it existed, so a new card says so plainly rather than drawing a month of empty days.

What it does not do yet

There are no date pickers, no per-page drill-downs, no countries, no goals and no exports. The card answers “is anyone coming, and what are they reading”. If you find yourself wanting one of the others, say so — the numbers behind the card already exist, and the ask tells us which screen to build.

You can also ask the AI: “which page do people visit most?” or “did anyone read the new article?” It reads the same numbers the card shows.