How we count

Analytics is only useful if you can trust the numbers, so here is exactly how Seebly counts, and what it can't know. Last updated 31 October 2026.

People, not bots

Seebly counts a visit when a browser loads your page and runs the Seebly script. Most bots never run it. The ones that do are removed in three steps:

• Known bots are dropped on arrival: any visit whose browser identifies itself as a crawler, monitor or preview tool.
• Likely bots are found by pattern every 30 minutes: bursts of near-identical visits in one hour, and slow "scatter" crawls of one-page visits from the same setup. They move to a ledger you can open, with the reason for each.
• You stay in charge: if a day looks wrong, you can restore it from the ledger in one tap.

Visitors, without cookies

Seebly sets no cookies and stores no IP addresses. A visitor is a one-way hash of the site, the visitor's IP address and browser, and a secret salt that changes every day. That means the same person on two different days counts as two visitors, by design: nobody can be followed over time. "Visits" are sessions that end after 30 minutes without activity.

Traffic from AI assistants

A visit is counted as coming from an AI assistant when it arrives from one: the referrer is ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek or Meta AI, or the link carries a tag such as utm_source=chatgpt.com. This is the clearest sign an assistant recommended your site, because someone clicked through from its answer.

Some people copy a link out of an AI app instead of clicking it. Those visits arrive with no referrer and show as Direct: no analytics tool can attribute them.

AI reading your pages

AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so they are seen by an optional one-line ping from your server. Seebly sorts them by who sent them:

• Read live for someone's question (for example ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User): an assistant opened your page while answering a person.
• AI search indexing (for example OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot): building the index AI search draws on.
• AI training (for example GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider).
• Search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot and others).

What this can't tell you: a live read means your page was used to help answer a question. It doesn't tell us whether your site was shown to the person or cited. A click from an assistant (above) is the evidence of a recommendation.

Google and Bing searches

Search numbers come straight from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools through their official APIs, after you connect your own accounts. They are the engines' own figures: Google's are usually 2 to 3 days behind, and both round or hide very rare searches for privacy.

Why our numbers may differ from other tools

• Lower than Google Analytics? Usually because bots are removed and because ad-blockers block some analytics scripts, Seebly's included.
• Higher in some places? Seebly doesn't need cookie consent, so it counts visitors who decline cookies, whom cookie-based tools miss.
• Different "visitors"? Our daily reset means multi-day totals count returning people again; tools with cookies may count them once.

Questions or something that looks off? Email hello@seebly.io. Details of what is stored are in the data policy.