Visitors

The Visitors page shows the individual readers seen in a range, and lets you open one: the visits they made, the pages of each visit in order, and what they did on those pages.

It changes what you can see, not what Pulse collects

Every column this page reads was already being written for your site. The switch controls whether anyone can read those columns one reader at a time. Turning it on collects nothing new; turning it off hides the view and leaves the data exactly as it was.

What a "visitor" is here

A server-derived pseudonymous key, re-minted at the start of every calendar month in your site's timezone, shown under a generated two-word name.

• No name, no email, no account, no cookie, nothing stored on the reader's device.
• It cannot be linked to the same reader on another site.
• At the end of the month it stops existing: a returning reader comes back as a new visitor, under a new name.
• History begins 26 August 2026. The date picker will not offer earlier days, because earlier rows have no monthly identity — and no backfill is possible, since the identity derives from an IP address that was never stored.

Because the identity resets monthly, a reader who visits in August and again in September is two visitors, not one. That is the trade the design makes on purpose: long enough to make a month's numbers honest, short enough that no long-term profile can exist.

The list

Each row is one reader in the selected range: their name, where they were, what they were using, and how much they read. Above it, a presence field plots the readers in range as dots — nearer the right, more recently seen. Hovering or focusing a row lights that reader's dot, so you can find them in the field.

Opening a visitor

• The month ribbon shows that identity's month, day by day, so you can see the shape of their reading at a glance. It reads left to right, day 1 to 31.
• Visits lists each visit, oldest first, on the page that still holds the most recent ones — the same direction the ribbon and the steps read.
• Profile is what was true at first touch and what was seen most recently.

Inside a visit

Expand a visit and you get its pages, in order, with the events that fired while each page was open listed beneath it.

• A page you genuinely visited twice appears twice — those are two pageviews.
• The counters at the top (Pages · Outbound · Downloads · Events) filter the steps by kind. They count everything loaded and do not change as you filter.
• Outbound clicks and downloads are described in words — "Left for example.com/pricing", "Downloaded price-list.pdf" — because Pulse records those itself and knows their shape.
• Your own custom events keep their name and every property. Only you know what checkout_step means, so Pulse shows it rather than guessing.

If you have added the optional interaction script, clicks, copies and form submits appear here too.

Where visitor-level data never appears

It also respects your other privacy settings: a site collecting country only will not show a city here, and a site that does not collect page paths will not show them.

Blank cells

A dash means Pulse does not collect that for this site — not that it is hiding something. Narrow a setting and the cells it governs go blank rather than disappearing, so the page stays honest about the shape of what it knows.