We wanted to know which pages people actually reach — particularly the free tools — without installing the kind of thing this page exists to say we do not have. So the counting happens on our own server, as the page is built, and it records this and nothing else: the date, the address of the page, roughly where in the world the visit came from, and one added to a number.
What follows from that is the important part. There is no cookie and no identifier of any kind, so there is nothing to connect one page view to another — we cannot tell whether two views were the same person or two people, and we could not work it out later even if we wanted to. Anything a normal analytics product sells is impossible here by construction: no visitor counts, no sessions, no journeys, no profiles.
Two details worth stating because they are easy to get wrong and invisible from outside. Your IP address is never written into these files, and neither is your browser’s user-agent. Nor is anything after the question mark in a URL — the counter reads the page’s filename, not the address bar, so a search term or a form value cannot end up in there by accident.
We also record which site sent you, when your browser volunteers it: the site’s name only, such as “google” or “bing”, never the search you typed or the page you came from. That is how we tell whether writing for search is working at all.
Since 3 September 2026 we also count roughly where visits come from — a town and state, or just a country. Here is exactly how that works, because the mechanism is the reassuring part. Your IP address arrives with every request, as it does on every website. We look it up against a table of address ranges stored on our own server, add one to a running total for the place it points at, and then the address is gone — it is never written into the file and never sent anywhere. Nothing is asked of a third party, so no other company learns you were here.
The honest limits of that. It is approximate, and often wrong by a city — it describes where your connection appears to come from, not where you are. It is a total for the day with nothing attached to it, so it cannot say which pages you read. And on a quiet day a town might show a count of one, which is a smaller crowd to be part of than we would like; we thought that worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to work out.
A date · a page · a rough place · a number — no cookie, no script, no identifier
The files stay on our own server and go nowhere else. If you would rather not be counted at all, a browser or extension that blocks trackers will not help here — there is nothing for it to block — so the honest answer is that this is one you cannot opt out of, exactly as the access logs below are. The trade we made in return is that it holds nothing about you.