First-Party Analytics (AI-Signal-First)

AI OS ships a built-in, first-party analytics panel with a deliberate bias: the AI signals answer engines generate come first, traditional web metrics second. The core insight is structural — AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so tag-based tools like Google Analytics cannot see them. AI OS reads your origin server's access logs instead, where that traffic actually exists. No tags, no cookies, no third-party services.

What it tracks

AI crawl signals — the layer tag-based tools miss

• Live activity feed — "PerplexityBot fetched /pricing · 12s ago", streamed to the dashboard as it happens
• Engine leaderboard — hits per engine, classified by purpose: training crawls (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Amazonbot), search-index crawls (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot, DuckAssistBot), and live user-triggered fetches (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User — a human is asking an AI about your site right now)
• Crawl heat — which pages each engine fetches most: the engines telling you which content they consider answer-worthy
• Bot hygiene — robots.txt and llms.txt fetches, plus 404s served to AI crawlers (each one a missed citation opportunity)

Bot identity is self-reported by user agent, and the panel labels it accordingly ("reported identity"); IP-range verification against the engines' published address ranges is on the roadmap.

Answer-engine referrals

Human visitors arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot are classified separately from classic search, social, and direct traffic — the conversion side of AEO. Crawl signals show engines reading you; referral signals show engines sending you buyers.

The traditional baseline

Pageviews, unique-visitor estimates, top pages, and referrer classes — enough to sanity-check any other tool's numbers. Human counts are log-derived and strictly filtered: assets, health checks, vulnerability scanners, and non-AI crawlers are excluded, so a "pageview" here means a browser fetched a page.

Per-site attribution

A vhost-aware log format records which domain served every request, so each hosted site's traffic lands in its own bucket. The dashboard's Analytics view has a site selector — operators see the platform plus every site; a managed client sees only their own sites, enforced server-side by the same ownership checks that scope their sites, audits, and leads. Each site's Site Manager tab shows the same numbers next to its lead inbox.

Privacy posture

• No cookies, no localStorage, no fingerprinting scripts — there is no client-side tag at all
• Unlinkable visitor estimates — uniques use a hash of IP + user agent salted with a value that rotates every 24 hours; identities cannot be joined across days by construction
• First-party only — data never leaves your server; there is no vendor to phone home to
• Bounded retention — raw events are pruned after 30 days; long-term charts read from small daily rollups

Setup

Step	Detail
Log access	The platform process needs read access to the nginx access log — typically usermod -aG adm <app-user>, then restart the PM2 daemon (group changes apply at daemon start)
Log format	Install deploy/aios-logformat.conf to /etc/nginx/conf.d/ and use access_log ... aios_vhost; in each server block — this adds the serving hostname for per-site attribution. Plain combined-format lines keep working (they land in the platform bucket)
Env override	ANALYTICS_ACCESS_LOG points the ingester at a non-default log path; when the file is absent the ingester idles harmlessly

Ingestion is incremental (byte-offset tracked, restart-safe, logrotate-aware) and the first run backfills whatever history the current log file holds.

API Endpoints

Frequently asked questions