I built my own analytics with the help of AI – cookie-free and GDPR-compliant

Not long ago, I realized I wanted a better understanding of my blog’s traffic.

I like clean and accurate data. But traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics come with serious downsides: inaccurate numbers (due to blocked consent requests and various tracking blockers), the need for a cookie banner, and questionable transparency around privacy.

So, I decided to build my own analytics system. And since it’s 2025, I teamed up with generative AI to do it.

We started with the basics – defining what I actually wanted to measure: daily visits, traffic sources, purchases of my premium articles, and a deeper breakdown of visitor types (real people vs. suspicious activity vs. bots).

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Of course, some challenges popped up right from the start.

The issues I had to solve

The first SQL queries we used were slow and inefficient. They dragged the whole website down. We gradually tuned them, replaced wasteful LIKE comparisons with exact matches, and optimized the logic to only process the data we really needed – and suddenly, it started to fly.

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