Unique hits
Total hits count every page load, refreshes included. Unique hits try to count browsers instead of loads, so a reader who opens four of your posts registers as one visitor for the day rather than four. It is a genuinely useful number and a deliberately imperfect one, and it is worth understanding which parts of it you can trust.
Unique hits are available on paid plans. Legacy free accounts ignore the unique-hits widget parameter.
How we count without identifying anyone
We do not store a visitor ID, because we do not create one. Instead, every incoming request is turned into a one-way SHA-256 hash of the visitor’s IP address, your site’s identifier, a truncated user agent, today’s date in UTC, and a salt that rotates every twelve hours.
Nothing in that hash can be reversed into the ingredients that made it, and the ingredients themselves stop lining up quickly: the date changes at midnight UTC, and the salt changes twice a day, which means even a same-day attempt to guess your way back to a visitor has a very short window and no payoff.
Two hashes come out of this. The visitor hash leaves the path out, so one person reading several pages stays one visitor — that is the hash behind sessions and journeys. The unique hash includes the path, which is what produces the per-page unique count on a path row.
Country is looked up from the IP address and then the address is thrown away. It is never written onto the hit.
What the number is not
It is not a cookie, a fingerprint, or a person you can follow. The same human returning tomorrow produces a different hash and counts again. Someone who reads you in Safari and then in Firefox counts twice. Several colleagues behind one office connection, on similar machines, can collapse into one. That is the trade we have chosen: approximate visitor counts and no durable record of a reader.
Bots and obvious automation are filtered out before any of this happens, so they do not inflate the estimate.
Turning it on
Unique hits appear on Overview as soon as unique tracking is enabled for a site. If you would like the number on your own pages too, the hit counter widget accepts ?hits=unique.
If you want the full walk from page load to stored row, how we handle visitor data has it.