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Backlinks: A powerful feature you've probably been ignoring
There's a small icon that appears next to referrers throughout Clicky, and most of you have probably never clicked it. This icon is our Backlinks feature, which we introduced it back in April 2021. At the time it was bundled with a much bigger visitor log redesign, and the icon itself is easy to overlook if you don't know it's there, so let's give it a proper spotlight!
If you've been using Clicky for a while, you've noticed that referrer data has gotten a lot less useful over the years. Chrome started stripping referrers down to domain-only in July 2020, Firefox followed suit in March 2021, and that was basically the end of the era where you could see the specific page a visitor arrived from. We've written about this before if you want the full story.
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Sign in with Google is here!
Whether you're just signing up for Clicky today, or you're so old that you've had an account with us since before the iPhone existed 👴... everyone (with a Google account) can now use Sign in with Google to securely access their Clicky account. The only data points we use from your Google profile are your name and email; nothing else!
Google offers a variety of strong multi-factor authentication options, making this a much more secure method than our original token-based 2FA system that we released in 2021. It's also more reliable, since you don't have to worry about automated emails being delayed or hitting your spam filters.
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Javscript fetch vs sendBeacon: Pros, cons, quirks, etc
In October 2025, we updated our tracking code to replace
navigator.sendBeaconwithwindow.fetch+keepalive. It's backend change that's invisible to most, but we thought it was worth writing up because there's some interesting browser behavior involved, and the tradeoffs aren't necessarily obvious.This one of those things we tweeted about, but never documented otherwise. We're going to try to get better abouut documenting these changes on our blog, to make sure as many people know abouut them as possible.
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Fighting AI bot traffic is basically a full time job now
The past six months have been an absolute grind fighting and blocking malicious AI bots from ruining your traffic reports. What started as "some reports of excessive bot traffic" last September has turned into a near-constant escalation, with new bot generations, geographic surges, and increasingly sophisticated evasion tactics. We've been posting about it quite a lot on Twitter as things develop, but it's worth summarizing at this point.
Early September brought an uptick in bot traffic that stood out from the usual background noise. It looked like a new wave of AI crawlers, not the traditional scrapers our existing filters already handle. This prompted us to finally enable Cloudflare's "bad bot" blocking across all our tracking domains, something that we had been resisting for a while:
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AI, UTMs, and referrers
This weekend, we released some major changes to referrer and UTM parameter processing.
UTM parameters (utm_campaign, utm_source, etc) are over 20 years old now, and were originally designed to track online marketing. Over time though, their usage has become much more casual, as referrers have been slowly reduced to a rotting corpse thanks to Google, who started this whole thing with their "secure search" trial back in 2010.