Pulse: a visitor is recognised for one day at most

What changed

• One day, at most. Since 27 October 2026, from your site's own midnight, Pulse recognises a visitor for one day in your site's timezone. The id comes from the IP address and the browser's user-agent string with a random key made for your site and that day. Five minutes after your site's day ends, Ciphera deletes the key and keeps no copy of it, so Pulse cannot recompute that day's ids. No visitor id is written any more. A reader first seen at 23:50 is recognised for ten minutes.
• Visitors over a range add up each day's unique visitors. A returning reader counts once for each day they visit. This is now the only rule, for every day since your site joined Pulse.
• Past figures were restated on 27 October 2026. From 26 August to 26 October 2026 Pulse had kept a monthly id, so a returning reader counted once within a window of up to a month. On 27 October 2026 Pulse deleted those ids from its analytics data and recounted every figure that covers several days in that period, so each one now adds up each day's unique visitors. Those figures read higher than before, and the chart's days now add up to the headline. Single days, hourly views and realtime were already counted per day and do not change. An export, growth report or API result saved before 27 October 2026 keeps the old figures. Imported history keeps the visitor figures its source reported.
• The identity window setting is retired. Session only, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and calendar month are gone; a value chosen earlier has no effect.
• The tracking script keeps nothing in the browser. From version 1.7.0 it sets no cookie and uses no session storage or local storage, except the opt-out flag a site owner sets in their own browser with ?pulse-ignore. A reload within five seconds still counts once: the server applies that rule. Older copies of the script, such as a pinned version or a plugin copy, may keep values in the tab's session storage until they are replaced.
• Visitors profiles cover up to one day. If you use the Visitors page (off unless you turn it on), each profile is one IP address and browser on one day; a reader who comes back on a later day is a new profile. Profiles from 26 August to 26 October 2026 were rebuilt the same way, so a person who came on five days is five profiles, and links to the old month-long profiles no longer work.
• No API or MCP change. Field names and types are the same. visitors over a range is the sum of each day's unique visitors, for every period.

Why

Pulse no longer recognises a reader for longer than a day, and keeps no key that could. The monthly ids it had kept for two months were the kind of identifier this change removes, so they were deleted too, and the figures built from them were recounted the same way. The price is that a returning reader counts once for every day they visit, so on sites with returning readers, visitor numbers over several days are higher than they were.

See how a visitor is recognised, Visitors, the API and data export.