ConvertNow Analytics: Privacy Friendly Stats, Bot Filtering and AI Traffic

Description

ConvertNow Analytics is a free, privacy friendly WordPress analytics and statistics plugin that counts real visitors only. Bots, AI crawlers, SEO scanners and headless browsers are filtered out and shown to you by name, so the numbers on your dashboard are people.

Here’s the problem it solves. Most web analytics tools count anything that runs JavaScript, and a lot of what reads the web does that now: screenshot services, uptime checks, SEO auditors, and a growing crowd of AI agents. A self hosted stats plugin can report several times the traffic a site really has.

ConvertNow counts people. A pageview has to render on screen, then somebody has to move, scroll, tap, or stay for two seconds. It also has to come from somewhere people actually read from, not a cloud data center. Everything refused is kept, named, and shown under Filtered Traffic, never quietly dropped.

AI traffic analytics: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot

See which AI assistants send you real readers and which pages they cite. Track referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek and more, each as its own channel. Next to that, see the pages GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers read most. A crawler is never counted as a visitor, and an assistant fetching a page on somebody’s behalf is interest, not attendance.

Bot detection and filtered traffic

A chart of people against machines, every refused request by name and hour, and a Proof of Presence report that shows what convinced the plugin each counted view was real. Data centre addresses, headless Chrome, crawlers and monitors are refused before a row is written.

Every WordPress stat you expect

• Visitors, visits, pageviews, real bounce rate and time on page
• Top pages and posts, entry and exit pages, read depth
• Referrers, search engines, social networks, UTM campaigns
• Countries with a world map, languages, browsers, devices
• Goals, funnels, journeys, retention, segments and cohorts
• Explore with a chart builder, engagement, page flow and a traffic calendar
• AI Overview, crawl to referral and crawler analytics
• Traffic by author and content type for editorial sites
• WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads revenue by channel and landing page
• Outbound link, file download, email and phone click tracking
• Broken link (404) and site search reports
• Tracking health checks and alerts by email or Slack
• A weekly email report, a shareable read only dashboard, CSV and JSON export

A privacy friendly Google Analytics alternative

No cookies, no localStorage, no persistent identifier. Visitors are a one way hash of IP, user agent and a salt that rotates daily, so nobody is followed past midnight. Raw IP addresses are never stored. Your data stays in your own WordPress database and is never sent to a third party.

Fast and lightweight

No account, no API key, no tier held back. The tracker inlines into the footer at about 1.5 KB, works with page caching plugins and CDNs, and answers a pageview before the rest of WordPress loads. Raw hits roll up into daily summaries hourly, so a year of history costs the same queries as a day. Every chart is plain SVG.

Clicks, downloads and searches

On from the moment you install. A click is one row per interaction, so events keep their own retention window, ninety days by default. Each type can be switched off on its own: outbound links, file downloads, email and phone links, anything you name with a CSS selector (labelled by data-cnwa-label or its own text), pages that returned a 404 and the pages that linked to them, and what people typed into your search box. The settings screen shows what event capture costs on your site, from your own traffic.

Notes on the chart

Mark the day you redesigned, sent the newsletter or changed your prices, and the note stays on the chart with the traffic it explains.

A weekly email

Last week against the week before, your five most read pages and five biggest sources, readable in fifteen seconds. It comes from your own site, contains no tracking pixel, and costs the same whether you had a hundred visitors or a million.

Links

• ConvertNow Analytics docs and screenshots
• [email protected] or [email protected], both reach me

External services

Tracking, reporting, goals, funnels, journeys, retention, segments, cohorts, insights, alerts, country lookups and exports all run on your own server against your own database. There is no activation call, no licence check and no key. Nothing about your visitors ever leaves your site under any setting. The plugin makes the background requests below, and each one can be switched off.

Apple iCloud Private Relay exit list (on by default)

Once a week the plugin downloads https://mask-api.icloud.com/egress-ip-ranges.csv, the list Apple publishes of the addresses Private Relay traffic leaves from. It is used only so that Safari readers using Private Relay are not refused as data centre traffic. The request sends nothing but your server’s own address, the way any download does. Switch it off in Settings, Tracking, Data centre addresses. Apple’s terms: apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html. Apple’s privacy policy: apple.com/legal/privacy.

Site icons (on by default)

Icons for the major search engines, social networks and AI assistants ship inside the plugin and need no request at all. For any other referring site, the plugin fetches its icon in the background from the site’s own address (its home page and /favicon.ico, then the parent domain for a subdomain). When a site refuses requests from servers, the icon is fetched from DuckDuckGo’s public icon service at https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip3/, which is told the site’s host name and nothing else. Fetched icons are stored under uploads and served from your own site; opening the dashboard requests nothing from anybody else. Switch fetching off in Settings, Display, Site icons (bundled icons still show), or keep it and stop only the DuckDuckGo fallback with the cnwa_icon_fallback_service filter. DuckDuckGo’s terms: duckduckgo.com/terms. DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy: duckduckgo.com/privacy.

Alert webhook (off by default)

If you enter a webhook address under Settings, Alerts, each alert is posted to that address, and only to that address. The request carries the alert’s title and sentence, your site’s address and a link to the dashboard. Where it goes is the service you chose, under that service’s own terms.

Anonymous usage reporting (off by default)

If, and only if, you switch this on, the plugin sends one report a month, and one after each plugin update, to convertnow.tools, the author’s site, at https://convertnow.tools/wp-json/cnwa-hub/v1/report. It exists so the author can see which versions are in use and how the plugin is actually being used, and it is used for nothing else.

It is off on every install. You are asked once, on the plugin’s own screen and only after the plugin has a week of your own data, with the exact payload from your site shown to you before you decide. Declining is remembered permanently. If you never answer, nothing is ever sent. You can switch it on or off at any time in Settings, Data retention, Anonymous usage report. Switching it off removes the scheduled event immediately and sends one last request to the same address, carrying only your site address, the install date and the plugin version, which asks convertnow.tools to delete every report your site sent. Nothing is sent after that.

This is the complete payload, and there is nothing else in it:

• Your site address and site name
• The date this plugin was first activated on your site
• Your total pageviews and total visitors for the last 30 days, as two numbers
• The ConvertNow, WordPress and PHP versions, and your site locale

It contains nothing about your visitors: no page paths, no referrers, no IP addresses, no visitor hashes, no user accounts, no email addresses, no post or page titles. The request is sent once every 30 days and once after each update, and a failure is silent.

Terms of service: convertnow.tools/terms. Privacy policy: convertnow.tools/privacy.

Requests to your own site

The daily health check loads your own home page and posts a test beacon to your own collector, both at your own address. Nothing leaves your server.

The country lookup tables ship inside the plugin as plain text files and are read from disk. There is nothing to download and nothing to import.Links

• Plugin home page: convertnow.tools/convertnow-analytics
• Support by email: [email protected]
• The author directly: [email protected]
• Support forum: wordpress.org/support/plugin/convertnow-analytics
• Leave a review: wordpress.org/support/plugin/convertnow-analytics/reviews

Both addresses reach the same inbox. Email is usually the faster of the two; the forum is the better place for anything another user might hit as well.

Bundled data

IP Geolocation by DB-IP, used under CC BY 4.0.

Data centre detection reads two plain text tables built from the X4BNet datacenter lists, MIT licensed, plus a short supplement of documented cloud supernets: assets/data/dc-ipv4.csv and assets/data/dc-ipv6.csv, in the same boundary format as the country tables. The build script is tools/build-dc-tables.py in the development sources.

Brand icons in assets/icons/ come from SVG Logos and Simple Icons (CC0), Lobe Icons (MIT) and Font Awesome Free (CC BY 4.0). assets/icons/CREDITS.txt lists which is which. Every trademark belongs to its owner; the icons are used only to identify the site a visit came from.

Country lookups read two plain text tables built from the DB-IP IP to Country Lite database: assets/data/geo-ipv4.csv and assets/data/geo-ipv6.csv. Every line is one boundary, written as an uppercase hex address prefix and an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, so both files can be opened and read in any text editor. The world map outlines are plain JSON path data at assets/data/world.json. Nothing in the plugin is compiled, minified or obfuscated.

Technical details