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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How cookieless analytics counts visitors without storing anything
The daily-rotating salted hash, explained properly: what it can measure, what it deliberately cannot, and why the limitation is the feature.
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Should you block AI crawlers? An honest cost-benefit
The argument is usually made on principle, in both directions. It is a business decision with measurable inputs, and the right answer is different for a documentation site than for a newspaper.
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Using Cloudflare D1 for analytics: what works and what does not
D1 is SQLite with a request budget. That combination rules out the obvious analytics schema and makes a less obvious one work very well.
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Server-side versus client-side analytics: what each can actually see
The debate is usually framed as accuracy versus detail. That is roughly right, but the specific list of what each side can and cannot observe is more useful than the slogan.
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How to track traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude
AI assistants send real visitors, and most analytics files them under the wrong channel or loses them entirely. Two configuration details decide whether the number you see is right.
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Is Google Analytics legal in the EU?
Data protection authorities in Austria, France, Italy and Denmark all ruled against Google Analytics. Then the Data Privacy Framework arrived. Here is where that leaves you.
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Edge analytics: counting the request instead of the page
Moving measurement from the browser into the request path changes what is observable. Two things become visible that no tracking script has ever been able to see.
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GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot: what each one actually does
Not all AI crawlers do the same job. Some collect training data, some fetch a page because a person just asked a question. Blocking the wrong one costs you readers.
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Google Analytics alternatives that don't need a consent banner
A practical comparison of the analytics tools that run without storing anything on a visitor's device — what each one costs, where the data lives, and what you give up.