Honest link analytics: requests vs clicks vs visitors

When you share a link in a messaging app, the app itself fetches it to build a preview before any human clicks. If every request counted as a click, your campaign would look better than it is.

Three different metrics

• Requests: every time the short link is requested, by anything.
• Valid clicks: requests minus bots, link previews, prefetching and HEAD requests.
• Estimated visitors: the number of distinct daily hashes among valid clicks.

The limits of bot detection

We use a maintained list of known crawlers, but some bots pretend to be real browsers and will be counted. That is why excluded requests are always shown next to clicks, and why we avoid aggressive filtering that could silently remove real visitors.

Why we do not store IP addresses

Request data is turned into a keyed hash that rotates every day. That is enough to estimate unique visitors day by day, but it cannot track a person across days or links.

Country only when reliable

We never guess locations. Country appears only when the platform runs behind a trusted provider that supplies it, and cities are never shown.

Compare periods of equal length and watch days with spikes in excluded requests — they often mean the link was shared in large group chats.