Analytics without the surveillance
Practical writing on measuring a website honestly: consent and the law, cookieless measurement, migrating off Google Analytics, and getting numbers you can act on.
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What owning your analytics data actually means
Self-hosted, data ownership and no lock-in are used loosely enough to be marketing. Here are the four questions that separate the real version from the phrase.
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Which analytics metrics actually matter, and which are theatre
Most dashboards show thirty numbers and about five of them should change a decision. Here is which, and what each is genuinely evidence of.
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Why AI Overviews traffic is invisible, and what to do instead
Google's AI Overviews send clicks that look exactly like ordinary organic clicks. No tool can separate them, because the signal does not exist. Here is what you can actually infer.
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The free analytics options for Cloudflare, compared honestly
Three genuinely free ways to measure a site on Cloudflare, each with a different ceiling. Knowing which ceiling you will hit first is the whole decision.
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How to migrate from Google Analytics 4 without losing your history
Export the history, run both tools in parallel, reconcile the gap, then switch. The whole migration is an afternoon — provided you export before you delete anything.
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Analytics in a single-page app: the four things that break
React, Vue, Astro and the rest all break analytics in the same four ways. None are difficult to fix, and all four are silently wrong until somebody checks.
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Crawled but not cited: measuring what AI takes and what it returns
An AI crawler reading a page is a cost. A visitor arriving from an assistant is a return. Almost nobody measures both, which means almost nobody knows whether the exchange is fair.
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Counting unique visitors with Durable Objects
Two edge locations each seeing one visitor cannot tell whether that is one person or two. Solving that properly turns out to give you session stitching and real-time for nothing.
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Safari, ITP and what actually happens to your analytics
Intelligent Tracking Prevention caps first-party cookies, blocks third-party ones outright, and strips some referrers. Cookieless measurement sidesteps most of it, but not all.