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Live Visitor Tracking: What It Is and When It Helps

Updated

TL;DR

Live visitor tracking shows you the people who are on your website at this moment, not a report of people who were there earlier. A good live view tells you how many visitors there are, which pages they are on, and where they came from, while it is happening.

Three kinds of visitor tools

Most confusion comes from three different jobs being sold under one name.

Analytics Session replay Live visitor view
Question it answers What happened over time? How did one person use the page? Who is here right now?
Time frame History After the session Now
Stores data about visitors Yes Yes (recordings) Depends on the tool
Typical use Reports, trends, funnels Debugging, UX review Launch day, support, curiosity

Analytics tools like Google Analytics have a Realtime report, but it shows counts: active users in the last 5 and 30 minutes, by source and page (Google). Session-replay tools build recordings you watch later: Hotjar's help, for example, says live user actions are compiled into a playback recording after the session ends (Hotjar help). Some replay tools add live modes too: Microsoft Clarity has live recordings (Clarity docs), and Contentsquare, which Hotjar is now part of, lists "Live browsing heatmaps and replays" on its paid plans (Contentsquare pricing). A live visitor view sits between analytics and replay: people, not counts, and now, not later.

What whoisbrowsing's live view shows

whoisbrowsing draws each current visitor on your real page when you open your own site:

  • a coloured cursor with a fading trail, and ripples for clicks;
  • phone and tablet visitors as a see-through band over the part of the page they are looking at;
  • arrows at the edge for visitors scrolled out of view;
  • a side panel with live counts per page, busiest first, and one line per person.

Each line tells you the page, the source (Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, another site, or direct), an approximate city, device, browser and operating system, and time on site. It never identifies a person.

When live tracking helps

  • Launch days. Watch a post or announcement land, page by page.
  • Checking a change. Ship a new page and see who finds it and where they go.
  • Understanding a source. See what a visitor from a search result or an AI assistant does on arrival. See where visitors come from, live.
  • Quiet sites. On a small site, one real person arriving is worth noticing; a browser notification can tell you.

What to look for in a live tool

  1. Does it store data? Some tools keep recordings or visitor history. In whoisbrowsing, nothing about your visitors is stored on our servers.
  2. Does it set cookies? Microsoft Clarity documents first-party and third-party cookies and says typical usage requires non-essential cookies (Clarity cookies). whoisbrowsing sets no cookies on visitors.
  3. How heavy is the script? Ours is under 4 KB gzipped and loads with defer.
  4. Who does it show? In whoisbrowsing, visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown.

What a live view looks like in practice

Say you run a small site and send a newsletter with a link to a new post. You open the post yourself and watch. A few lines appear in the side panel as people click through: one reader is on a phone, so a see-through band moves slowly down the post as they scroll; another is on a desktop, and their cursor drifts toward the sign-up button and clicks, leaving a ripple. Each line shows where that person came from and an approximate city, such as "near Austin, TX". When someone moves to your pricing page, the per-page counts change. Nothing here is a report. It is the room as it is now, and when the readers leave, the view is empty again.

Install in one line

<script src="https://live.whoisbrowsing.com/s.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" defer></script>

Then open your site and watch. Test yourself by opening the site in a Chrome Incognito or Safari private window; your own regular browser is never counted. Try it with no signup.

When whoisbrowsing is not the right tool

If you need history, funnels, retention, heatmaps over time or recordings of sessions, a live view is the wrong shape. Pair a live view with an analytics product for reporting. See live view vs session replay for how to decide, and the comparison page for specific products.

Common questions

Is live visitor tracking the same as analytics? No. Analytics aggregates over time. A live view is about the present moment and, in whoisbrowsing's case, keeps nothing afterward.

Do I need an account? Not to start. /try creates a site with no sign-in, and you can claim it later. Sign-in is by Google.

Does it cost anything? It is free, with no credit card and no usage limits for now.

Can an AI coding agent install it? Yes. Paste: Add whoisbrowsing (live visitor view) to this project. Follow https://whoisbrowsing.com/SKILL.md exactly. See install.