Why Skald exists
It began with one question on our own website: is AI reading us, and does it send anyone? No tool could answer it from data we owned. So we built one.
Where it began
One question nobody could answer
Skald began on our own small business website. More and more people who find a business now ask an AI assistant first. So we wanted to know three plain things.
- Is ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity reading our pages?
- When someone asks it a question, does it fetch our page to answer?
- Do the people it cites actually click through?
Put shortly: is AI reading us, and does it send anyone? Our analytics could not tell us. Not because it was set up badly, but because of how it works. No tool could answer it from data we owned, so we built one.
The blind spot
What the usual tools miss
Three kinds of AI traffic reach a website today:
- Training crawlers collect pages to train models. Nobody is waiting on them.
- Live fetches. An assistant fetches your page while it answers someone. A real person is waiting.
- Click-throughs. A person clicks the link the assistant cited and lands on your page.
Script-based analytics see only the third, and only when the referrer survives. The first two run no JavaScript, so a tool built on a tag never counts them. Google Analytics also drops known bots on purpose.
Some people are missing too. Ad-blockers stop many trackers, and with consent mode a visit may not be sent at all until the visitor agrees.
The one record that sees every visit is the web server's own access log. So Skald reads that. See every feature, and how Skald compares with other tools.
What we hold to
Four rules behind every number
- It adds up, or it is withheldEvery figure is counted twice. A day the two counts do not agree on is withheld, never guessed.
- Unknown stays unknownA figure that was not recorded stays blank. It is never shown as zero.
- People are an upper boundA browser's name is self-reported. Requests, people and machines are never mixed.
- Nothing hiddenSpam, test, cancelled and removed rows are listed in full, not dropped.
We are honest about limits too. Skald does not replace Search Console for search queries and ranking, or GA4 for ad spend and deep in-page analysis. It sits beside them. Even the gap between Skald's count and a script's count is useful: it shows how much the script misses.
Who it is for
Built for people who need figures that hold up
- Founders and marketers who need to know whether ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity read their site, and whether those answers send people and leads.
- Agencies and SEO teams who report AI visibility to clients and need figures that hold up.
- Engineers and site owners who want analytics with no third-party script, no cookie banner for counting, and data on their own server.
- Privacy-minded organisations that must answer a deletion request with one command.
Want to see it before you decide? Click around the live demo with sample data, or install Skald on your own server.
The name
Why "Skald"
Say it "skawld": one syllable, it rhymes with "called". In the Viking Age and after it, the best-known poets of the North were skalds. Most of those whose names we still know were Icelanders. They travelled to the halls of kings and chieftains. Their craft was to watch what happened, remember it, and tell it back: who came, what they did, what changed.
Two things about the skalds fit this tool.
They reported only what they had seen
Skaldic verse was valued as a record. Snorri Sturluson wrote that no skald would dare tell a king about deeds everyone present knew to be false. Skald works the same way: every number is recounted, and a day that does not add up is withheld.
They needed no one's permission to watch
A skald stood in the hall and saw everyone who entered: guests, strangers, spies. Skald reads the server's own log, so it sees what a tracker cannot. It needs no cookie and no script in the visitor's browser.
Every visit, truly told.
The logo is a quill crossing a carved stave. The quill is the skald writing the record. The stave echoes a carving in stone, the oldest kind of log in the North. It is a plain carved bar on purpose, not any real rune, so it borrows no rune's meaning.
Who builds Skald, and under what licence: about Skald and Space-O Technologies.
Live demo
Click around the real dashboard with sample data
Every section, 60 days of a made-up site. In your browser, nothing to install, no sign-up.
Hosted Skald
Start free. We set it up for you.
30 days free, no card. Your account is ready within one working day. Or run it yourself, free, with the install guide.