Google Analytics

The Google Analytics screen reads sessions, page views and active users for your Website, broken down by page viewed or by session landing page. It also carries realtime visitors, which is the only live call anywhere in RankX AI.

The connection is read-only, authorised with OAuth, and RankX AI never writes to Analytics.

Page viewed and landing page are different concepts

They come from different Analytics reports and they answer different questions, so mixing them produces nonsense:

By page viewed counts every view of a page, wherever the visitor came from and whatever else they looked at in the same session. It answers "which pages get read".

By session landing page counts sessions by the page they entered on. It answers "which pages bring people in", which is the question that matters for search work.

The landing-page view also carries engaged sessions; the page-viewed view does not, and RankX AI reports that as absent rather than as zero.

The user figure is not unique visitors

The active-user figure is summed per row. A visitor who saw four pages contributes to four rows, so adding the column up does not give you a count of people who visited your site.

This is a property of how the data is aggregated rather than a limitation RankX AI adds, and it is stated on the screen and in the tool's own response because it is the easiest wrong reading available here.

For a headline "how many people", use the totals Analytics itself reports rather than a sum of a breakdown.

Realtime is the one live call

Realtime visitors asks Google directly for who is on the site right now, over a rolling window of roughly thirty minutes, optionally broken down by page, country or device.

Everything else in this section reads already-synced data, and that is the right default: stored reads are fast, cost nothing and survive an upstream outage, and going live would not make Search Console fresher because that delay is Google's own. Realtime is live because no stored aggregate can answer its question at any sync frequency.

Two consequences worth knowing:

A freshly connected property can show realtime visitors while every other Analytics screen is still empty. That is not a contradiction; the first nightly sync has not run.

A revoked connection reports that it needs reconnecting, never zero visitors. Same rule as everywhere else.

Reading it alongside search

Analytics covers every traffic source; Search Console covers Google search only. The useful readings are in the difference:

Search Console clicks against Analytics sessions from organic search will never match exactly, and the gap is not an error. They are counted differently, at different moments, with different definitions of a visit.

A landing page with sessions and no Search Console impressions is getting traffic from somewhere other than Google search. Worth knowing before you credit an SEO change for it.

A page with impressions and almost no sessions is being seen and not clicked, which is a snippet and intent problem rather than a ranking one. Check whether an AI Overview is showing on those queries in Search Console.

When there are no numbers

Analytics refuses rather than reporting zero. There are four connection states and only one yields figures. See why traffic data is missing.

Driving this from an assistant

get_analytics_traffic for the stored breakdowns, get_realtime_visitors for the live call, and get_google_integration_status when either refuses. All free.

"Show me my top landing pages by sessions for the last 30 days, with engaged sessions, and tell me which of them get no Search Console impressions."

See the tool reference.

Where to go next

• Search Console, for the search half.
• Indexing, for pages that cannot earn either.
• Why traffic data is missing, when a screen refuses.