Overview

If you're running Loamly alongside Plausible, Seline, or Google Analytics, you might notice Loamly reports 10-20% more visitors. This is expected and by design.

The short version: Loamly is built for complete visibility, not just clean numbers. We show you everything so you can understand the full picture—including traffic that other tools quietly filter out.

This difference becomes especially important when you're trying to understand AI traffic. AI platforms often interact with your site in ways that traditional analytics tools dismiss as "noise."

Why the numbers differ

Every analytics tool makes decisions about what counts as a "real" visit. These decisions are invisible to you—you just see the final number. Here's what's happening behind the scenes:

Scenario	Plausible / Seline	Loamly
Page loads in a background tab	Ignored	Counted
Visitor has "Do Not Track" enabled	Ignored	Counted
Visit from a cloud server or VPN	Often filtered	Counted (flagged as suspicious)
Automated browser checking your site	Often filtered	Counted (with detection signals)

The biggest difference is the background tab check. When you open a link in a new tab but don't switch to it immediately, Plausible waits until you actually look at the page. Loamly counts the visit right away.

Why does this matter? Because AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity often load your pages in the background to generate answers. If you only count "visible" visits, you miss this entirely.

What Loamly captures

For every visit, Loamly records behavioral signals that help you understand what's happening:

How they arrived — Did they type your URL, click a link, or paste it from somewhere?
Mouse movement — Did they interact with the page, or did it just load?
Automation signals — Signs that a bot or testing tool is visiting
Scroll and engagement — How far they read before leaving

This means when you see a suspicious visitor in Loamly, you can dig in and understand what happened. When other tools filter them out, you never know they existed.

Common patterns you'll see

Burst of direct visitors from different countries

If you see 10 visitors from 10 countries in one minute, all showing up as "Direct" with only your homepage as their page—these are almost always automated checks. Common sources include:

Browser security scans — Microsoft SmartScreen, Google Safe Browsing
Link preview bots — When someone shares your URL in Slack, Discord, or email
Uptime monitors — Services checking if your site is online
VPN exit nodes — Multiple users sharing an IP address

Loamly flags these with signals like "paste navigation" and "no mouse movement." You'll see them in your Attribution table, but they won't skew your conversion metrics because they don't convert.

Same visitor, two records

When ChatGPT or Perplexity researches your site to answer a user's question, you might see:

An "AI Bot" visitor — The AI platform's crawler fetching your page
A "Human from AI" visitor — The person who asked the question and then clicked through

This is correct. The bot and the human are separate events. Both matter for understanding how AI platforms drive traffic to your site.

Is this a problem?

No. Here's why:

Your conversions are accurate — Automated traffic doesn't fill out forms or make purchases. The numbers that matter stay clean.
AI traffic is visible — You see the complete picture of how AI platforms interact with your content.
Suspicious traffic is flagged — The signals are there for you to filter if you want to.

The "extra" visitors you see in Loamly are real HTTP requests to your server. They're not phantom numbers—they're just requests that other tools choose not to show you.

Focus on what matters

When comparing analytics tools, compare conversions and revenue attribution—not raw visitor counts. Those metrics tell you what's actually driving business results.

Why this matters for AI traffic

Loamly was built for the AI era, where a growing share of your website traffic comes from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI platforms. This traffic behaves differently:

AI bots fetch your pages to generate answers—often in the background
Users copy URLs from AI chats and paste them into their browser (no referrer)
The same person might visit multiple times in one session as they explore AI-suggested links

Traditional analytics tools like Plausible were designed for a world where all traffic came from search engines and social media. They filter aggressively to show "clean" numbers. But that filtering can hide 30-50% of your AI traffic.

Loamly takes a different approach: show everything, flag what's suspicious, and let you decide what matters. This gives you complete visibility into how AI is discovering and recommending your content.

The discovery gap

Google Analytics shows much of this traffic as "Direct" because there's no referrer. Loamly uses behavioral signals and bot correlation to reveal the AI connection—so you know when someone found you through ChatGPT, not by typing your URL from memory.

FAQ

Should I worry about inflated numbers?

No. The "extra" visitors are real requests. Other tools hide them; Loamly shows them. Your conversion rates and revenue attribution remain accurate because automated traffic doesn't convert.

Can I filter out suspicious traffic?

Yes. In the Attribution table, use the Visitor Type filter to focus on "Human" visitors only. You can also filter by source to exclude "Direct" traffic with no engagement.

Why doesn't Loamly filter aggressively like Plausible?

Because AI bots often look like the "suspicious" traffic that other tools filter out. Background fetches, unusual timing, no referrer—these are all signals of AI traffic. If we filtered aggressively, you'd miss the AI visibility that Loamly is designed to provide.

Will this affect my billing?

Loamly bills based on tracked events, so more visitors does mean more events. However, the difference is typically 10-20%, not 10x. If you're seeing dramatically higher numbers, check for a misconfigured bot or crawler hitting your site repeatedly.

Can I make Loamly match Plausible's numbers exactly?

Not currently. We're considering adding an option to only count visible tabs for users who prefer stricter counting. For now, we believe seeing the complete picture—especially for AI traffic—is more valuable than matching other tools.

Which number is "correct"?

Both are correct—they're just measuring different things. Plausible answers "how many people actively looked at my site?" Loamly answers "how many times was my site accessed, and by whom?" For understanding AI traffic, the second question matters more.