What free website visitor tracking shows you and what it leaves out
The published limits behind GA4, Search Console, Clarity, Dealfront Lite and RB2B's free plan, read for a UK B2B team
Free website visitor tracking from GA4, Search Console and Microsoft Clarity shows how many people visited, where they came from and what they did. It doesn't name companies. Free identification plans do, with caps: Dealfront Lite shows the last 100 companies a month with seven days of history, and RB2B Free gives 150 company-level matches.
In short
- GA4, Search Console and Microsoft Clarity cost nothing and measure behaviour well, but none of them names the companies behind your visits.
- Ahrefs found 46.77% of Search Console clicks were tied to anonymised queries in April 2025, so free search data leaves nearly half of searches blank.
- Dealfront Lite keeps seven days of history and the last 100 companies a month, which is shorter than most B2B buying journeys.
- RB2B gives its own free-plan company coverage as 15 to 20%, so by the vendor's own figure most visits stay unnamed.
- Since 31 October 2025 Microsoft Clarity has needed a valid consent signal for UK visits, so free tracking in the UK depends on a cookie banner that's set up properly.
Free website visitor tracking can tell a UK B2B team how many people came, where they came from and what they did. Google Analytics 4, Search Console and Microsoft Clarity do that at no cost. None of them tells you which companies those visitors work for. The free plans that do name companies are capped, and they forget quickly.
We went through the published figures behind the main free options. Every one of them tells you something useful, and every one has a catch that the sign-up page leaves until later.
Can you track who looks at your website for free?
Partly. Behaviour is free and well covered: GA4 counts visits, sources and pages, and Search Console shows the Google searches your pages appeared for. Knowing who the visitors are is a different job. That's visitor identification, which means matching the IP address a visit came from (the number that identifies a network on the internet) to the organisation that owns that network. Google's free tools don't do it.
There's also a GA4 retention setting that most teams never open. On a standard property, Google lets you keep user-level and event data for either two months or 14 months. Age, gender and interest data is always kept for two months, whatever you choose1. According to Google, the setting only affects explorations and funnel reports, so the standard reports carry on as normal. Where it bites is when a director asks for a path analysis of last spring's visitors and the exploration only goes back two months. Checking your property's data settings takes seconds. We'd do it today.
Why are so many Search Console queries hidden?
Ahrefs looked at 22 billion clicks across 887,534 Search Console properties. In April 2025, 46.77% of those clicks were tied to anonymised queries, up from 45.02% a year earlier2. These are searches Google counts but won't show you, because it treats them as too rare to reveal without risking searchers' privacy. Specialist B2B sites get a lot of their traffic from rare searches. So they have more to lose here than most.
That figure won't tell you your own site's share. It's an average across a very large and mixed sample, and yours could sit well above or below it. And Search Console never links a query to a company, which is the gap we covered in seeing which searches brought a company to your site.
Free company identification has a short memory
Dealfront, which owns Leadfeeder, offers a free Lite plan. It shows the last 100 companies a month in its Web Visitors view, keeps seven days of visitor history and allows unlimited users. Paid plans start at €79 a month billed annually, or €113 a month billed monthly3. RB2B's free plan gives 150 monthly resolutions, a resolution being one identified visitor. That's company level only, with no person-level identification, no email addresses and no integrations beyond Slack and Teams4.
The two caps don't compare neatly, since one counts companies and the other counts resolutions. RB2B publishes a more telling number itself: company-level coverage of 15 to 20% on the free plan4. Take the vendor at its word and four in five visits still go unnamed. Then there's the seven-day window. Say a buyer read your pricing page three weeks ago and comes back today. To the tool they're a new visitor, because the first visit has already dropped off the list. Don't expect person-level data for UK visitors either: RB2B only offers it for US visitors, and only on paid plans.
A company name with no reason attached is close to a guess. Scout gives every match a 1 to 99 confidence score with a band and a one-line reason, so a weak match is clearly marked as weak.
How many of your visitors are people at all?
Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report found that automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic in 2024. That was the first time in a decade it had overtaken human traffic, and malicious bots alone made up 37%, up from 32% the year before5. Bear in mind where the number comes from: a security company measuring the traffic it sees across its own network. It says more about the internet as a whole than about a typical UK B2B site. And a company that sells bot protection has every reason to find plenty of bots.
Still, it's a fair warning about free hit counters and visitor counter widgets, which count every request they receive. A raw counter on a B2B site can look much healthier than the pipeline behind it. We wouldn't put one in front of the board. AI crawlers add another layer of noise, which we covered in our piece on ghost visits in Google Analytics.
Do free tracking tools need a cookie banner in the UK?
Yes. Microsoft Clarity records sessions and builds heatmaps, and Microsoft calls it "a free service forever" and says you'll never hit traffic limits6. Since 31 October 2025, though, Clarity has required a valid consent signal for visits from the UK, the EEA and Switzerland. In its consent mode, a visitor counts as not having consented until your banner says they have7. Visitors who decline are still measured without cookies, but Microsoft says session recordings and funnels may be limited for them.
So in the UK, the price of a free tool is a consent banner that's wired up to it properly. You also end up with a smaller sample than the dashboard suggests.
Free website visitor tracking tools side by side
| Tool | Price | Names companies? | Main limit or note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | Free | No | Explorations keep two or 14 months of user data |
| Google Search Console | Free | No | 46.77% of clicks on anonymised queries (Ahrefs, April 2025) |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | No | UK visits need a consent signal |
| Dealfront Lite | Free | Yes | Last 100 companies a month, seven-day history |
| RB2B Free | Free | Yes, company level | 150 resolutions a month, coverage stated as 15 to 20% |
| Scout, our product | Paid, monthly billing, see plans | Yes, with a 1 to 99 confidence score | Company matches shown alongside your own GA4 and Search Console data |
Putting company names next to the free data
The free tools are good at counting visits and poor at naming them. The free identification plans name a few companies, then hold on to them for about a week. Scout identifies the company behind a visit and keeps ISP, mobile, VPN and data-centre traffic in the low confidence band. It also connects to your GA4 and Search Console data, so each company comes with the pages it read and the searches associated with it. If you want to see what that adds to your free setup, start a 14-day free trial with no card needed.
Frequently asked questions
Can you track who looks at your website?
You can track what visitors do for free with Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity, but not who they are. Visitor identification tools match a visit's IP address to the company that owns the network. They name organisations, not individuals, and free plans such as Dealfront Lite cap you at the last 100 companies a month.
How can I see how many people look at my website?
Google Analytics 4 is free and reports users, sessions and pages viewed. Search Console shows how often your pages appeared in Google and how many clicks they got. But Imperva found automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic in 2024, so a simple hit counter will usually overstate how many real people you're getting.
How to identify anonymous web visitors?
Use a visitor identification tool, which matches the IP address of a visit to the company that owns it. There are free options, with limits: Dealfront Lite keeps seven days of history and RB2B Free gives 150 company-level matches a month. Paid tools add longer history, confidence scoring and CRM integrations.
Can someone see that I visited their website?
Not by name. A site owner sees aggregate analytics. If you browse from your employer's office network, a visitor identification tool may show your company as the visitor. They only learn who you are personally if you log in, fill in a form or click a tracked link in an email.
Sources
- Google Analytics Help: Data retention support.google.com
- Ahrefs: Anonymized Queries Make Up Nearly Half of Google Search Console Traffic ahrefs.com
- Leadfeeder by Dealfront: Pricing leadfeeder.com
- RB2B: Pricing rb2b.com
- Imperva: 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, How AI is Supercharging the Bot Threat imperva.com
- Microsoft Learn: Clarity frequently asked questions learn.microsoft.com
- Microsoft Learn: Clarity Consent Management learn.microsoft.com