Simba SYSTEMS

How we measure growth

By Simba Systems · · 2 min read

The Growth page shows one number the whole network cares about: how many people are reading. Here is exactly where that number comes from, because a growth chart with no methodology behind it is not worth publishing.

Two sources, clearly labeled

Cloudflare gives two different views of traffic for a zone:

  1. Zone analytics, pulled from the Cloudflare GraphQL Analytics API: requests, page views, bytes, and cached-versus-uncached, for every request Cloudflare sees at the edge. This includes bot traffic, health checks, and scrapers.
  2. Web Analytics, from Cloudflare's privacy-first JavaScript beacon, where a site has it enabled: visits and page views measured by an actual browser executing the page. This is a much closer approximation of human readers, because bots overwhelmingly do not run JavaScript beacons.

Where a site has a Web Analytics token configured, that is the series charted by default. Where it does not, the page falls back to zone page views, and the chart says so.

What counts as a page view

A page view is a page load recorded by whichever source is active for that site. It does not deduplicate a reader who visits five pages into one "visit" on the zone-analytics series, that is what the separate "unique visitors" and "Web Analytics visits" figures are for.

What is not in the chart

  • Traffic to /api/* routes on any site's Worker
  • Requests that never reached Cloudflare's edge (there are none, by design, every site is behind Cloudflare)
  • Anything before a site's Cloudflare zone existed, there is no way to backfill traffic that predates measurement

Refresh schedule

pipeline/export_analytics.py runs daily on the Mac Pro after 03:00 Pacific and pulls the prior day's complete data. If Cloudflare is unreachable that day, the chart keeps showing the last successful export rather than a gap, and the run is logged as failed. The exact export logic and the raw exported JSON are both in the repository, nothing here is a black box.

Full detail, including which GraphQL datasets are used and their retention window, is on the Methodology page.

methodology analytics