Analytics & Traffic Tracking

Traffic Dashboard

Your Dashboard shows a live event stream (individual pageviews appear within seconds via a realtime connection) plus historical aggregates that update hourly. Interactive stat cards, sparklines, and trend indicators sit on top.

Key Metrics

• Total Traffic: All pageviews across your websites
• AI Citations: Visits from AI engine citations
• Active Campaigns: Currently running syndication campaigns
• Authority Score: Entity Authority Score (0-100) measuring AI discoverability

Each metric shows a trend indicator (↑↓) comparing to the previous period and a sparkline showing daily trends.

Traffic Sources Breakdown

ReachSurge automatically categorizes traffic by source:

• AI Citation Traffic: Visitors clicking links in ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
• Probable AI Traffic: Visitors matching AI referral patterns without explicit referrer
• Organic Visits: Traditional search engine traffic
• Social Visits: Traffic from social media platforms
• Direct Visits: Users who typed your URL directly

Date Range Filtering

Use the date picker (7d / 30d / 90d) on the dashboard to view different time periods. Stats and sparklines automatically adjust.

Traffic Forecasting

ReachSurge generates a 30-day traffic forecast by projecting your recent trend forward. The forecast chart shows:

• Predicted daily traffic (dashed line)
• Confidence band (shaded area)
• Plain-English summary of the trend

Forecasts are generated weekly, on Mondays, for sites on a paid plan (trials included) with at least 14 days of analytics data in the last 90 days. Until a site meets that, the chart shows a placeholder instead of a forecast.

Anomaly Detection

Automated anomaly detection is paused while we rebuild it, so no anomaly alerts are sent right now. When it runs, it alerts you to:

• Traffic falls well below what's normal for your site on that day of the week, so a naturally noisy site needs a bigger drop to trigger an alert than a steady one
• Unusual traffic spikes
• Drops in visits referred by AI assistants
• Day-of-week seasonality is accounted for

When detection is running, critical anomalies appear as a banner at the top of your dashboard and trigger email/Slack/Discord notifications.

Recommendations

On paid plans (trials included), your dashboard shows recommendations for the selected site. Sites are checked weekly, on Mondays, against your site's analytics, and each recommendation states the numbers it is based on. There are two:

• Pageviews are falling and your generated pages are out of date: pageviews in the last 7 full days are more than 10% below the 7 days before (each week needs data on all 7 days, and the earlier week at least 100 pageviews), and no page ReachSurge generated for the site has been updated in 14 days.
• Little traffic comes from AI assistants: in the last 28 full days, the page views and clicks AI assistants sent were under 10% of those search engines sent, with at least 100 from search engines.

Dismiss hides a recommendation for 30 days, and Mark as done hides it for 14 days. After that it comes back if the numbers still show it.

Connect Google Analytics 4 (Growth+)

Import Google Analytics 4 data to compare your traffic before and after ReachSurge. Set it up under Settings, then Integrations, then Google Analytics 4.

1. In Google Cloud, create a service account, grant it access to your GA4 property, and download its JSON key.
2. In ReachSurge, pick the website this property measures, enter your GA4 Property ID (the numeric id from your GA4 admin), and paste the full service-account JSON. A property binds to one site, so if you track several sites, connect each one separately.
3. We pull your GA4 pageviews on a nightly sync. Use Sync now on the integration card to pull immediately after connecting instead of waiting for the overnight run.

GA4 data sits alongside your ReachSurge tracker data so you can see both in one place.

Connect Google Search Console (Starter+)

Google Search Console shows your Google impressions, clicks, and average position next to your AI citation data, so you can see traditional search and AI search together. Set it up under Settings, then Integrations, then Google Search Console.

1. You must already have verified ownership of the property in Search Console.
2. Connect with Google (OAuth). We never see your Google password.
3. Bind a property to a site. On connect from a site's page we auto-pick the matching property; afterwards, the Google Search Console card lists your properties and sites so you can bind more. One connection carries as many property-to-site bindings as you need: one property per site, one site per property.

We sync recent Search Console rows daily for every bound site. Google finalizes Search Console data on a two to three day delay, so the most recent day or two fills in later. Impressions, clicks, and position then appear on your analytics surfaces beside your citations.

FAQ

How real-time is the data? Individual events appear in your dashboard within seconds via a live realtime connection. When you install the tracker, the /analytics page shows a "Waiting for your first event…" indicator that flips to "Tracker connected" the moment we receive your first pageview. Aggregate stats (KPI totals, sparklines, source breakdowns) update hourly via an aggregation cron.

How accurate is the traffic data? Our tracker captures 95%+ of visits. Some ad blockers may prevent tracking.

What's "probable AI traffic"? Visits that arrive with no referrer at all and land directly on a content page rather than your home or marketing pages. It's a heuristic, not a measurement: some of it is genuinely AI-assistant traffic that strips the referrer, and some is bookmarks or pasted links.

How does the forecast work? We start from the average of your last 7 days, leaving out the busiest and the quietest day, and move it by the typical slope of the last 28 days, with that slope fading the further ahead the forecast goes. The first day with data in the last 90 days is left out, because for a site that started tracking recently it is usually a partial day. The confidence band widens the further out the forecast goes, and its top is capped so one unusual day cannot stretch it.