How to check your website traffic for free

To check your own website traffic, add an analytics script to your site's HTML and open the dashboard it reports to. With Clicktag's free website analytics, you sign in with a Google account, add your domain, paste one 4 KB latest.js tag, verify ownership, and open your reports. Pageviews appear in the Live tab within about a second. If you don't run the site, you only get third-party estimates, unless the owner shares their real numbers with you.

How to check traffic on your own website in 5 steps

1. Sign in with Google

Go to clicktag.app and sign in with your Google account. Clicktag is free, takes no credit card, and lets you add up to 50 websites on one account.

2. Add your website

Click Add site and register the hostname your pages are served from, such as example.com (www.example.com counts as a different site). Open Site settings > Installation to copy your snippet, which already includes your data-hostname and data-verify attributes.

3. Paste the 4 KB script tag

Put latest.js once in your root HTML document, React index.html, or Next.js app/layout.tsx. There is no npm package to install, and single-page app route changes through pushState and popstate are tracked automatically.

<script
  async
  src="https://clicktag.io/latest.js"
  data-hostname="example.com"
  data-verify="YOUR_SITE_VERIFY_TOKEN"
></script>

See the installation docs if you need the Next.js App Router layout snippet or Content Security Policy headers.

4. Verify your site

Clicktag only stores traffic after a site is verified. If your server sends the script tag (with its data-verify token) in the homepage HTML, verification runs automatically on the first visit. If your site injects the tag only with client-side JavaScript, publish a DNS TXT record at _totallytics-verify.example.com with the value totallytics-verify=YOUR_SITE_VERIFY_TOKEN, or serve the token as the entire body of https://example.com/.well-known/totallytics-verify.txt. Then click Check verification under Verify another way.

5. Open the dashboard and Live view

Open your site in the dashboard, click the Live tab, and load your website in another browser tab. Turn on Only my traffic to filter the stream to your own browser and network address. Your hit shows up within about a second. If you want to click around a populated report before installing the tag, open the live demo dashboard (its numbers are synthetic sample data).

What website stats you see in Clicktag

Once the tag is live, Clicktag breaks down your traffic without setting cookies or using local storage:

• Visitors and pageviews: Visitors are counted using a daily salted SHA-256 hash. The salt is deleted shortly after each UTC day ends, so visits can't be linked across days. Known bots are excluded from both visits and pageviews.
• Top pages and entry pages: Which URLs get the most views and which pages bring people onto the site from outside.
• Time on page and scroll depth: The median of pageview durations of 5 seconds or more, plus the average of each page's deepest scroll, as a percentage.
• Sources: Where visits came from. Clicktag reads utm_source first, then source or ref query parameters, then the referring host. Google search domains roll up under google.com, while gemini.google.com, chatgpt.com, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot appear as their own sources. Visits with no referrer and no UTM land in Direct / none.
• Countries, devices, browsers and OS: Country comes from the browser's time zone rather than IP address lookup.

You can stack up to 12 filters at once on any report to drill into a specific page, referrer or country.

Where to find each answer in Clicktag

Can you find out who visited your website?

Clicktag tells you where visitors came from and what they viewed, not who they are. It never stores IP addresses, sets no cookies, and builds no individual visitor profiles.

In the website visitor tracking reports, you see aggregates: how many visitors arrived from google.com or chatgpt.com, which countries and devices they used, and how many completed a goal. In the real-time analytics Live tab, each hit shows a short visitor id, the page or event, device, browser and country, and clicking a row reveals a city-level location estimate from the network edge. The stream and the workspace map are not stored anywhere and disappear when you close the page.

How to check traffic on someone else's website

Exact traffic numbers require a tracking script on the site or access to its server logs; everything else is an outside estimate.

When you check a competitor's domain in an external traffic checker, you are looking at modeled estimates, not measured pageviews. If the owner uses Clicktag and works with you, there are three ways to see the real numbers:

• Ask the owner to share the site with your Google account. Up to 25 people per site can view every report, Live included, but change nothing.
• Ask the owner to mark the dashboard public (is_public), which lets anyone view the reports or read the Stats API without a key. Public dashboards have no Live tab, and goals, Search Console and crawler data stay private.
• Ask to be added as one of the up to 25 recipients on the site's scheduled email traffic reports.

FAQ

Is Clicktag really free to check website traffic?

Yes. Every Clicktag feature is free, with no credit card and no paid plan today. One Google account can track up to 50 websites, with up to 50 goals per site and scheduled email reports to up to 25 recipients per site.

Does Clicktag track bounce rate or session recordings?

No. Clicktag does not report bounce rate, heatmaps, session recordings, or individual visitor profiles, and it has no ecommerce revenue tracking. Instead of bounce rate, it reports median time on page (from pageviews lasting 5 seconds or more), average scroll depth, entry pages, and 2-to-6-step funnels.

Can I import my old Google Analytics traffic?

No, Clicktag does not support Google Analytics imports or CSV uploads. You can import historical stats from Simple Analytics, and you can connect Google Search Console to backfill up to 16 months of search queries and clicks alongside your new Clicktag data.

How does Clicktag count returning visitors without cookies?

When retention tracking is on, the first pageview of each page load requests /r, and the browser keeps that response in its standard HTTP cache until the UTC day ends. Its Last-Modified date holds the visitor's first and last visit days for that site only, so Clicktag can report weekly cohorts for up to 12 follow-up weeks without writing cookies or local storage. A browser counts as new again after its HTTP cache is cleared, or in a private window on a later day. You can turn this off with data-retention="false".

Does the 4 KB script track file downloads and button clicks automatically?

No. latest.js records pageviews and single-page app route changes on its own, but it does not automatically capture clicks, outbound links, file downloads, or form submissions. To track those, call window.tt_event(name, metadata, callback) in the browser or send a JSON POST to /events from your backend.