Crawlers and agents, counted
Each crawler and AI agent gets its own row: who runs it, what it says it's for, and whether its network or signature checks out. AI assistants that send people back show up as a channel.
Little Friend vs Plausible.
Cookieless analytics that also sees the bots. Little Friend adds a report and a door for crawlers and AI agents, journeys with consent, and goals your server confirms.
Why teams choose Little Friend over Plausible
- Crawlers and AI agents in their own report, with evidence for each one.
- A door at your edge that lets agents in, slows them down or blocks them.
- Journeys, funnels and masked session replay, free during the beta.
- An official, read-only MCP server for Claude and other assistants.
Side by side.
| Feature | Little Friend | Plausible |
|---|---|---|
| Cookies | None, in either privacy mode | None, and no persistent identifiers1 |
| Visitor identifiers | None in aggregate mode, the default. Journey mode keeps a random id for one browser tab, with consent. | A daily hash of the site, IP address and user agent. The salt is deleted every 24 hours.2 |
| Bots and AI crawlers | An Agents report with evidence for each one, and an optional door at your edge that lets them in, slows them down or blocks them. Crawlers are counted from a Vercel log drain or your edge. | Filtered out, including data center traffic and referrer spam3 |
| Visits from AI assistants | An AI assistants channel, next to the requests each AI company made | An AI Assistants source, such as ChatGPT and Claude4 |
| Funnels and journeys | Journey timelines, funnels and paths, in journey mode | Funnels and user journeys on the Business plan56 |
| Events from your server | Server events, and goals that count only what your server confirms | Events API, for server-side and app tracking7 |
| Session recordings | Opt-in, for journey sessions. Every word is masked until you choose to show it, and form values are never recorded. | Not in its feature list8 |
| AI assistants reading your numbers | Read-only MCP server for Claude, Cursor and any MCP client | A community-built MCP server, listed in its docs9 |
Your site has more visitors than people.
A door for AI agents
Rules in your Worker, proxy or server decide which agents get in, how often, and which must sign their requests. Every project starts in dry run, and people always get in.
Journeys and replay
With consent, each visit reads as a short timeline of the steps you name. Optional session replay masks every word until you choose to show it.
Run both while you try it.
- Add the tag next to Plausible's. One script tag with your site key. Both run side by side. Install
- Let the crawlers in. Add a Vercel log drain or
@littlefriend/edge, and crawlers that never run JavaScript show up in the Agents report. Agents - Remove the old tag when you're ready. Little Friend counts from the day you add it, and your dashboard is ready with no setup.
Sources.
- Plausible: home page
- Plausible: data policy
- Plausible: bot traffic filtering
- Plausible: top referrers
- Plausible: funnel analysis
- Plausible: user journeys
- Plausible: Events API
- Plausible: features
- Plausible: data access
Checked October 6, 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us at hello@littlefriend.io and we'll fix it.