Site analytics: visits by source, counted without cookies
Each published Anticode site counts its visits per day and by where they came from: search, AI assistants, social, other sites, direct and ads. Nothing is stored about the visitor, no cookie is set, and no third-party tracker is added to the page. Search engine and AI crawlers are counted on their own, so they don't inflate your visitor numbers.
Why count without cookies
Most analytics tools identify each browser with a cookie or a fingerprint so they can follow it around. That's what triggers consent banners in many places, and it adds a third-party script to every page. A small site rarely needs any of it. What an owner usually wants to know is simpler: are people coming, roughly how many, and from where? Cookieless website analytics answer that by counting each arriving visit against a day and a source, and keeping nothing else.
How a visit is counted
When a published page is served, Anticode's server classifies the request on the spot and adds one to a counter for that site, that day and that source. The visitor's address and browser details aren't stored. A few things are deliberately left out:
- Moving around your own site. A click from one of your pages to another isn't counted as a new visit.
- Prefetches. A browser loading a page in advance, before anyone opens it, doesn't count.
- Robots that aren't search or AI crawlers. Uptime monitors, scripts and link previewers are ignored.
| Source | Counted when |
|---|---|
| Search | The visitor came from a search engine such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Ecosia |
| AI assistants | The visitor came from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot or similar |
| Social | The visitor came from a social network or community site |
| Referral | The visitor came from any other site |
| Ads | The address carries an ad click id or a paid UTM medium |
| Direct | There was no referrer and no campaign tag |
When a visit arrives without a referrer, a utm_source tag is used instead where there is one, so a link you share in a newsletter can be tagged and still land in the right column. The guide to UTM parameters explains how to tag links.
AI assistants and crawlers, apart
Two kinds of AI traffic are worth telling apart. People who click through from an answer in an assistant are visitors, counted under AI assistants. The crawlers that assistants and AI companies send to read the web, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, aren't people, so they're counted under AI crawlers, as are search engine crawlers under their own heading. Neither crawler count is included in your visits. It's a quick way to see whether assistants are reading your site and whether that's turning into people arriving.
Where you see it
Open Analytics in the builder's Console. You'll see total visits, how many came from AI assistants and what share that is, your top source, and the AI crawler count. Below that is a chart of visits per day over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, filters for each source, and a bar for each source's share. Only days since the current site was published are counted, so a reused address never brings someone else's traffic with it. For a wider view across all your sites, with leads and a forecast, see the Intelligence page.
What it doesn't measure
- Which pages. Counts are per site, per day, per source, not per page.
- Individual visitors. There are no unique visitors, sessions, returning-visitor rates, time on page or paths, because nothing identifies a visitor.
- Conversions inside the page. Clicks and scrolls aren't tracked. Form submissions are recorded separately, in your submissions.
- Sales. Payments happen on your provider's checkout, so Anticode doesn't see them.
- No third-party tools on the page. Published pages can't run scripts, so you can't add another analytics tag to them. If you need heatmaps or A/B tests, Anticode doesn't offer them.
If you're deciding whether you need a consent banner at all, the guide to tracking website traffic without cookies and the one on cookie banners cover the questions to ask.
Questions people ask
Does Anticode's analytics set cookies?
No. Visits are counted on the server by day and source. No cookie is set and no identifier is stored for the visitor.
How can I tell how many people come from ChatGPT?
Visitors who arrive from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and similar assistants are counted under AI assistants, shown as a number and a share of all visits.
Why don't crawler visits show in my visit total?
Crawlers aren't people. Search and AI crawlers are counted separately so they don't inflate the number of real visits.
Can I add Google Analytics as well?
No. Published pages run no scripts, so third-party analytics tags can't be added.