How views, reads and visitors are counted

A number you can't explain is a number you can't act on. This page says exactly what Peakub counts, what it leaves out on purpose, and where the counting is still weak. The words used here (visitor, view, read, reader) are defined on the Analytics overview.

What happens when someone opens a page

Each time a page of Peakub opens in a browser, the page tells Peakub, once. The record says which page, which piece and which publication it belongs to, where the reader came from, when, and which browser identifier it was (more on that in Tracking and privacy). If the reader is signed in, the record is also tied to their account. A reader who has not accepted "Performance & analytics" in the cookie banner is still counted, but without an identifier or browser details.

• A page that is one specific piece of yours is recorded as a read.
• Any other page is recorded as a view. Pages that sit outside any publication (a reader's account page, the Studio) are not attached to a publication, so they never appear in your numbers.

Your insights only ever include activity that is attached to your publication.

Refreshing is not reading again

If a reader reloads a piece in the same tab within 30 minutes of the last time it was recorded, Peakub doesn't count a second read. The same piece opened in another tab does count again, because it is a new visit.

This means Views and Readers differ. Views counts reads. Readers counts distinct visitors who read: ten reads by one visitor are ten views and one reader.

Because the identifier exists only for readers who accepted analytics, unique visitors and readers only include those readers. Views and reads include everyone. The visitor figures are therefore a floor, not a headcount.

What is left out

Your own activity. When you look at your own insights, anything you did while signed in is removed from the audience figures. So is anything done from the browser you are using, even if you were signed out when you read your piece. It is removed at the moment you look, nothing is deleted, and it applies to the figures about readers: the Audience block, the Distribution map, the piece panels, the Templates block, Content Performance and the Leaderboard. One limit: it only removes you, not a co-editor, whose reads still count in what you see.

Robots and datacentre traffic. Search crawlers, link previewers, monitors and scrapers mostly come from the networks of cloud and hosting companies (Amazon, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and similar). Peakub removes visits that come from a list of those networks from the same reader figures as above. Some things to know about it:

• It is a named list, not a detector. It is deliberately cautious and will miss some robots.
• A visit whose network isn't known is kept. Peakub prefers to count a robot as a reader over dropping a real reader.
• Networks that carry real readers, such as the ones Apple's Private Relay uses to hide who is browsing, are left in on purpose.
• Money is never filtered. A payment made from behind a VPN is a real payment.

What comes from outside Peakub. Peakub only counts activity on Peakub itself: your publication's site and the Peakub pages around it. Readers of your RSS feed, or of a podcast in a player, are not counted.

Subscribers are counted differently

The subscriber figures on your Dashboard (total, free, paid) are not counted from page visits. They are counted from your subscribers' records, so they don't depend on the browser identifier and are not affected by anything on this page. If the visit counting is briefly unreachable, they still show.

Where the counting is still weak

• Readers who decline analytics. They count in views and reads, but not as visitors or readers, since they have no identifier. See Tracking and privacy.
• Visitors on a custom domain. A browser identifier set on peakub.com can't be used on your own domain, so a custom domain has an identifier of its own. A reader of your custom domain is a different visitor from the same person on peakub.com, and, as everywhere, only readers who accepted analytics are counted as visitors. See Custom domains.
• Several browsers, one person. Someone who reads on two devices, or clears their cookies, counts as more than one visitor.
• Location. Geography is only starting to fill in, so don't rely on it yet. A city is shown only when the location is precise enough. See the overview.
• The first weeks. Counting started on 8 October 2026. Numbers that look thin are thin.