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The Questions Your Website Analytics Should Just Answer

Published 14 August 2026

This guide is about a corner of our software we built for ourselves first, out of a frustration we suspect is widely shared. The questions a small business owner brings to their website numbers are short and plain — where is my traffic coming from, is it going up, which pages do people land on, and lately, am I being cited by AI assistants — and we could never get the standard analytics packages to answer them without a search through menus that felt like homework. So we built the page we wanted to open every morning, and this is a tour of it and of the thinking behind it, which you're welcome to keep even if you never use ours.

The questions, written down

Before building anything we wrote down what we actually wanted to know about our own sites, week in and week out. The list came out shorter than any analytics dashboard we'd ever been shown:

• Where is my traffic coming from — search, social, email, ads, AI assistants, or people typing us in?
• Is it going up or down, and what moved?
• Which pages do people land on?
• Am I being mentioned by AI assistants, and if so, onto which pages?
• Did anyone get in touch off the back of it all?

Everything else we'd ever looked at in an analytics package — bounce-rate mysteries, device breakdowns, engagement scores — had never once changed what we did next. The five questions above did, every time we could get them answered.

An instrument built for someone else's job

None of this is a complaint about the capability of the big packages, and we'd rather not throw sand at anyone. Google Analytics is a remarkable instrument, built to serve every business on earth at once — including enormous ones with data teams, advertising budgets measured in millions, and a full-time analyst to hold the configuration. Serving that customer means events, audiences, segments, custom reports and a learning curve, and the same surface is then handed to a shop owner whose entire question is "was this month better than last month?" The mismatch is one of size rather than quality, in the way a flight deck is not the wrong instrument panel, just the wrong one for a bicycle.

There's a second mismatch that matters in the UK and Europe: packages built to follow individual visitors between visits generally oblige the site to ask each visitor's consent first, which is what those cookie banners are doing. For the questions on our list, following anyone turns out to be unnecessary — counting is enough — and a counter that stores nothing about any individual has nothing to put behind a banner.

The book we keep instead

What we built is a single page we call Visits. One line pasted into your site starts the record, and every visit is filed through exactly one of seven doors: search, AI assistants, social, paid, email, referral, or direct. The script sets no cookies and keeps no identities — it counts visits, never people, so it cannot tell who anyone is and never asks your visitors to click through anything. The top of the page answers the first two questions on the list at a glance.

A "knock", while we're here, is our word for a conversion signal — a form sent, a call or email tapped, a thank-you page reached. The record keeps two grades apart: a knock your own site confirmed, and an attempt we watched begin but couldn't follow, because a tap on an email address opens a mail app and proves nothing about whether a message was ever sent. Plenty of analytics flattens those into one number; we'd rather be crystal clear about who actually got in touch and who only began to.

The AI door

The door we've not seen given first-class treatment anywhere else is the AI one. When somebody asks an assistant a question, gets an answer that mentions your business, and clicks through, the visit arrives carrying the assistant's address — chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and so on. Most packages file those among miscellaneous referrals, where they're invisible unless you go digging. We treat them as their own channel, because "am I being cited by AI?" has become one of the questions on the list, and a door of its own means you can see which assistants send people and which of your pages they land on.

One limit is worth stating plainly: a mention inside an AI answer that nobody follows leaves no visit behind, so the traffic view is a floor on your AI visibility rather than the whole of it. The other side of that question — how to become the business assistants mention at all — is its own subject, and we've written it up in LLM Visibility: What It Is and How to Actually Improve It.

Ask the book a question

The newest addition came from noticing that even a simple page leaves some questions a tap short of an answer. So under Paul's reading of your month there is now a row of pre-set questions — the ones we believe cover nearly everything a busy owner wants on a given morning. Tap one and the answer is computed on the spot from your own record, by arithmetic rather than by any AI, which is why each answer carries the stamp counted, not modelled and why those answers are free and instant. They say what window they read, and when the record is too young for a fair comparison, they say that too.

Beyond the chips you can ask anything in your own words — whether weekends outdraw weekdays, what changed since a campaign went out, whether the pages you care about are earning their keep. For those, Paul reads the entire sixteen-week record — every door, page, knock and country — before answering, and because that takes real reasoning rather than arithmetic, it's priced like the rest of his research: pay-as-you-go pence from a wallet, no plan required. A question whose answer earned its keep can be kept, and comes back as a one-tap chip from then on.

What we left out on purpose

The restraint is as deliberate as the features. You won't find demographic panels, device charts or a real-time visitor counter here — not because they're hard to build but because in years of running small businesses they never changed a decision we made. Our working rule for the page is that a number earns its pixels by being able to change what you do next; everything else is furniture that makes the useful numbers harder to find. And the record itself stays yours in the plainest sense: it's your business's traffic history, exportable as a spreadsheet whenever you want it, gathered for you and sold to nobody.

You don't have to switch anything off

If any of this appeals, the way in costs nothing to try: the snippet is one line, it runs happily alongside whatever analytics you already have, and after a few weeks you can put the two side by side and see which one you actually open. Some people will keep both — the big package for depth, the small page for the daily read — and that's a perfectly sensible place to land.

The wider point we'd offer even to someone who never touches our software is that the tools everyone says you have to use are not, in fact, a condition of doing business. If a category standard feels opaque to you, that feeling is information, and building — or choosing — the smaller thing that answers your actual questions is allowed. We did, we enjoy opening it every day, and we think you might too. For the broader picture of how the pieces fit together, Why Your Marketing Needs a System, Not Another One-Off and What Your Marketing Tool Should Know About You carry on from here.

Common questions

Do I need a cookie consent banner for website analytics?

It depends on how the analytics works. Tools that identify visitors and follow them between visits generally need consent in the UK and Europe, which is what the banner is asking for. Aggregate counting that sets no cookies and stores nothing about any individual has nothing on the visitor's device to consent to — that is how our tracker works, and it is why sites running it don't have to interrupt anyone. Regulation always deserves a check against your own circumstances.

Can website analytics show traffic from AI assistants like ChatGPT?

Yes — when someone clicks through from an assistant, the visit arrives carrying a referrer such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, and analytics can file it accordingly. Most packages bury these among general referrals; we give AI assistants a door of their own, so you can see which assistants send people and which of your pages they land on. The limit is worth knowing: a mention inside an AI answer that nobody clicks leaves no visit to count.

Do I have to replace my existing analytics to try something simpler?

No — a tracking snippet is one line in your site's template, and two can run side by side without interfering. Keep whatever you have, add the simpler one, and decide after a few weeks with both records open in front of you.

What kinds of questions can you ask Fly Away Paul about your traffic?

The everyday ones are pre-set as one-tap questions — this month against last, where visitors come from, what's rising and falling, how social is doing, which pages people land on, where in the world they are — each answered instantly by arithmetic on your own record, free. Beyond those you can ask anything in your own words, and Paul reads the whole sixteen-week record before answering; those questions are priced like the rest of his research, pay-as-you-go.