Knowledge base
Everything about PerchLens in clean, structured Markdown — built to read, to copy into any AI assistant, or to download as a single file.
Raw file: perchlens.com/wiki.md
A privacy-first, cookieless web analytics platform built for the AI era — it tracks how AI answer engines send and cite your traffic, not just Google and social.
PerchLens is privacy-first, cookieless web analytics built for the AI era. It shows you what's working on your site in seconds — and, uniquely, it tracks how AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot send visitors to your pages and cite your content, alongside your traditional search and social traffic.
Most analytics tools were designed for the search-and-social era. But more and more people now discover products, brands, and answers inside AI assistants — and those assistants quietly send referral traffic and cite sources that classic dashboards lump into "Direct" or miss entirely.
PerchLens treats AI engines as first-class traffic sources. On top of measuring that traffic, it gives you GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) guidance: concrete, prioritized steps to make your content more likely to be surfaced and cited by AI answer engines.
Indie makers, startups, content creators, SaaS teams, and anyone who wants honest, privacy-respecting numbers — and who wants to understand and grow their visibility in AI search, not just Google.
See side-by-side comparisons at perchlens.com/vs, or jump to Getting started.
Create an account, add your site, install the tracking snippet, and verify data is flowing — usually under five minutes.
Getting set up takes a few minutes. You'll create an account, add your site, drop a small snippet into your pages, and confirm data is flowing.
Sign up at perchlens.com/sign-up, then add your first site by entering its domain. PerchLens generates a unique tracking ID for that site (it looks like cv_xxxxxxxxxx).
Add the snippet to your site's HTML, just before the closing </head> tag. Your dashboard shows the exact snippet pre-filled with your tracking ID — copy it from there. It looks like this:
<script defer src="https://perchlens.com/cv.js" data-site="cv_xxxxxxxxxx"></script>
That's the whole installation for most sites. The script is tiny and loads asynchronously, so it won't affect your page speed.
Open your site in a browser, then check your PerchLens dashboard. Your visit should appear in Realtime within a few seconds. If nothing shows up, confirm the snippet is on the page and that your tracking ID matches the site.
Once data is flowing, you'll see visitors, pageviews, top pages, traffic sources, and — once AI engines start sending visitors — your AI traffic breakdown. From there, head to the Action Queue for prioritized ways to grow.
The free plan covers your first 10,000 events per month — enough to get real value before you ever pay. See Plans & billing for what each tier includes.
The core analytics surfaces — realtime, pages, sources, conversions, geography, heatmaps, and multi-site comparison.
PerchLens gives you clear, fast analytics without the clutter. Every metric is privacy-respecting and available the moment data starts flowing.
A single-screen overview of your site: visitors, pageviews, sessions, top pages, top sources, and trends over your selected date range — designed so you understand performance in about ten seconds.
See who's on your site right now: active visitors, the pages they're viewing, and where they came from. Useful for launches, campaigns, and confirming your tracking works.
Per-page performance — views, visitors, and engagement for each URL. Find your best content and the pages that need attention.
Where your traffic comes from: search engines, social, referrals, direct, and AI answer engines. Full support for UTM campaign parameters so you can measure the channels and campaigns you're investing in.
Define goals (signups, purchases, key page visits, custom events) and track conversion rates over time. Understand which sources and pages actually drive the outcomes you care about.
A world map and country breakdown of your audience, so you know where your visitors are.
See where visitors click and how they interact with a page, to spot friction and opportunities. (Available on paid plans.)
Manage multiple sites from one account and compare them side by side — handy for agencies, portfolios, and anyone running more than one project.
Every view supports flexible date ranges and period-over-period comparison, so you can see whether things are trending up or down at a glance.
How PerchLens stays cookieless and privacy-first — no consent banner required, GDPR/CCPA-friendly, and you own your data.
Privacy isn't an add-on in PerchLens — it's the foundation. The product is designed so you can measure what matters without compromising your visitors' privacy or burying your site under compliance overhead.
PerchLens does not use cookies and does not track people across different websites. Measurement is based on privacy-preserving, anonymized signals — there's no persistent identifier following a visitor around the web.
Because there are no tracking cookies and no cross-site profiling, most sites using PerchLens don't need a cookie-consent banner for analytics. That means a cleaner experience for your visitors and less legal friction for you. (Always confirm requirements for your specific jurisdiction and use case.)
PerchLens is built to align with modern privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. No personal profiles are built, and data is collected in an aggregate, privacy-respecting way.
Your analytics data is yours. It's never sold, and it isn't used to build advertising profiles. PerchLens exists to give you insight — not to monetize your visitors.
Automated bot and crawler traffic is filtered out of your human-visitor metrics, so your numbers reflect real people. (AI crawlers are reported separately — see AI traffic & GEO — so you get the signal without it polluting your visitor counts.)
For the full legal details, see the Privacy Policy.
Track referrals and citations from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot — and use GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to grow your visibility in AI answers.
This is what makes PerchLens different. As people increasingly find answers through AI assistants, those assistants quietly send traffic and cite sources. PerchLens makes that visible — and gives you a plan to grow it.
PerchLens detects and breaks out referral traffic from the major AI answer engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Instead of these visits hiding inside "Direct," you see exactly which AI engines are sending people to your site, which pages they land on, and how that's trending.
Beyond human-driven referrals, PerchLens identifies when AI crawlers and bots access your site — the automated agents that gather content for AI engines. Knowing what's being crawled (and what isn't) tells you whether your content is even eligible to be cited.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of making your content more likely to be surfaced, summarized, and cited by AI answer engines — the same way SEO optimizes for traditional search rankings. As AI search grows, GEO becomes as important as classic SEO for reaching your audience.
PerchLens analyzes your site and your actual traffic data and produces concrete, AI-powered recommendations to improve your visibility in AI answers — for example, clarifying and structuring content, adding the kind of factual, well-organized information AI engines prefer to cite, and improving crawlability. Recommendations are generated using a latest flagship LLM and grounded in your real data, not generic advice.
Track specific prompts and questions relevant to your business and monitor how your visibility in AI answers changes over time — so you can tell whether your GEO efforts are working.
llms.txt is an emerging standard that helps AI engines understand and use your site's content. PerchLens includes a free llms.txt generator so you can publish one for your own site: perchlens.com/tools/llms-txt.
Check whether — and how — AI engines reference your site with the free AI Citation Checker: perchlens.com/tools/ai-citation-checker.
Measure your AI traffic, see what's being crawled, generate and work through GEO recommendations, then track your prompts over time to confirm progress. The Action Queue is where these recommendations live and get prioritized.
Turn audits and AI analysis into a prioritized, persistent to-do list — SEO site audits, the Action Queue, topic clusters, and competitor tracking.
The Visibility tools turn analysis into action. Instead of a pile of disconnected reports, you get a single prioritized list of improvements you can work through and track over time.
The Action Queue is a persistent, prioritized list of SEO + GEO recommendations for your site. Each item is scored by likely impact, effort, and confidence, then sorted so the highest-value work rises to the top.
PerchLens crawls your site and surfaces technical and content issues — missing titles or meta descriptions, thin or duplicate content, crawlability problems, missing structured data, and more. These findings feed directly into the Action Queue.
PerchLens groups your content into topic clusters and highlights gaps — topics your audience cares about that you haven't covered well yet — so you know what to write next.
Add competitors and PerchLens analyzes the topics they cover, helping you spot "topics they rank for that you don't." Competitor counts scale with your plan.
Get a periodic rollup of your recommendation activity — what's new, what you've completed, and the top priorities to tackle next — so progress is easy to see and share.
Connect Google Search Console and GA4, automate with the REST API, MCP server, and CLI, embed live badges, and get alerts in email, Slack, or Discord.
PerchLens connects to the tools you already use and exposes your data through clean, developer-friendly interfaces.
Connect Google Search Console to bring your search queries and impressions alongside your analytics — useful context for both SEO and GEO work.
Import or connect GA4 so you can compare and transition without losing historical context.
A REST API lets you pull your stats programmatically and build your own dashboards, reports, or automations. See perchlens.com/docs/api.
PerchLens ships an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server so AI assistants like Claude Desktop can query your analytics directly in a conversation — "how did my site do this week?" answered from your real data. See perchlens.com/docs/mcp.
A command-line tool for checking stats and scripting workflows from your terminal.
Show off your traffic with live, embeddable badges for sites that opt into a public dashboard. See perchlens.com/docs/badges.
Annotation webhooks let services like GitHub and Vercel automatically mark events (deploys, releases) on your charts, so you can correlate changes with traffic shifts.
For the full developer reference, start at perchlens.com/docs.
A genuinely useful free tier plus paid plans that unlock higher limits, more AI actions, and advanced features. Lifetime deals available via AppSumo.
PerchLens is built to be affordable for indie makers and to scale with you as you grow.
The free plan covers your first 10,000 events per month — enough to get real, ongoing value before you ever pay. It includes core privacy-first analytics so you can see what's working from day one.
Paid plans raise your monthly event limits, extend data retention, and unlock advanced features such as heatmaps, more competitors, a larger monthly allowance of AI actions, and team access. Business adds the highest limits for serious sites and teams.
Exact limits, prices, and what's included on each tier are kept current on the pricing page — always check there for the latest.
AI-powered features (like generating GEO recommendations) draw from a monthly AI-action allowance that scales with your plan. This keeps powerful AI features available and predictable. You can see your current usage in your account.
PerchLens offers lifetime deals through AppSumo for those who prefer a one-time purchase over a subscription. Lifetime tiers map to plan features and stack (a higher-tier code always wins). See perchlens.com/appsumo.
You can change plans at any time from your account settings. Upgrades take effect immediately; you stay in control of your subscription and can cancel whenever you like.
See the Refund Policy for details.
Quick answers to the most common questions about privacy, AI traffic, setup, accuracy, and how PerchLens compares to other analytics.
For most sites, no. PerchLens doesn't use cookies or track people across sites, so analytics typically don't trigger consent-banner requirements. Always confirm the rules for your specific jurisdiction.
It's privacy-first and cookieless (no banner), far simpler to read, and — uniquely — it tracks traffic and citations from AI answer engines and gives you GEO guidance. See comparisons.
When someone clicks through to your site from an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot), that's an AI engine referral. PerchLens breaks these out as their own sources instead of hiding them in "Direct."
Generative Engine Optimization — optimizing your content to be surfaced and cited by AI answer engines, the way SEO optimizes for search rankings. See AI traffic & GEO.
No. The script is tiny and loads asynchronously, so it doesn't block your page or affect load speed.
Yes. Your data is never sold or used to build ad profiles. PerchLens collects privacy-respecting, aggregate signals to give you insight. See Privacy & compliance.
Yes — it's a standard snippet that works anywhere you can add HTML. There are step-by-step guides for popular platforms at perchlens.com/docs/install.
Yes — 10,000 events per month, free. See Plans & billing.
Yes. Manage multiple sites from one account and compare them side by side.
Yes — via the MCP server you can ask an AI assistant like Claude Desktop about your stats directly. See Integrations & API.
Visit the Help Center or contact us.
Plain-language definitions of the key terms used across PerchLens — analytics basics plus AI-era concepts like GEO, AI referrals, and llms.txt.
utm_source, utm_campaign) to measure specific campaigns.cv_xxxxxxxxxx).This knowledge base is built to be machine-readable. Copy any section as clean Markdown, or download the whole wiki as a single .md file to feed an AI assistant.
This wiki is designed to be fed to AI assistants. Every section is clean, structured Markdown, so you can drop it into ChatGPT, Claude, or any agent and get accurate, grounded answers about PerchLens.
perchlens.com/wiki.md directly) to save the entire wiki as a single Markdown file.curl https://perchlens.com/wiki.md -o perchlens-wiki.md
The .md endpoint returns the complete knowledge base as plain Markdown — ideal for piping into a script, a RAG index, or an AI assistant's context.
Once you've pasted or attached the wiki, try:
PerchLens helps sites get found and cited by AI answer engines — so we practice what we teach. Clean, structured, copyable Markdown is exactly the kind of content AI engines understand and cite. This page is both documentation and a working example of GEO-friendly content.