1
History, and what changed
Readings are stored, so you can see this week against last week instead of only a snapshot of today.
Higashi Web Stats
Most of your traffic is not people.
You cannot see which part.
Your analytics counts visitors and quietly throws the machines away. So the crawler copying your catalogue, the AI company taking every page, and the scanner looking for a way in all arrive unseen, and the visitor number you do see is not what you think it is.
See what it shows you Or jump to the price
Free, open source, and it runs on your own server. HWS Live, the paid part, is $10 a month.
91%
of what reached this site in one week was a machine. The owner's analytics showed 1,099 visitors and said nothing about the other 11,707.
HWS puts both on the first screen, names every crawler, and checks whether a bot claiming to be Googlebot really is.
Why it matters
Three things you cannot answer today
1
Is my work being taken?
Someone copying your pages wholesale looks like steady, ordinary traffic. You find out when it turns up on another site.
2
Are the AI engines reading me?
Answers are built from pages crawlers collected. Whether yours were taken, and how often, is invisible in every normal analytics tool.
3
Are my numbers even real?
If half of what you count is automated, every decision you make from those numbers is made on the wrong figure.
What Live adds
What only a service can have
2
Comparison with similar sites
Baselines from other sites of the same size and type, so "a lot of crawler traffic" becomes a number you can judge.
3
A weekly email, without asking
A reading lands in your inbox every Monday. Nothing to open, nothing to remember, and you notice a change in your crawler traffic without going looking for it.
4
The model is ours
Your readings are written with a model we pay for. No provider account of your own to set up, fund or keep an eye on.
What leaves your server
Counts and crawler names. Nothing about your visitors.
Your install sends an aggregate report and gets a reading back. The report carries counts, crawler names and a verdict — never IP addresses, paths, URLs, user agents or page content. A validator on our side rejects a report that looks like it contains any of them.
We observe logs and report what we see. We never block or change traffic. When we see something that might be a catalogue walk, we explain what happened, how sure we are, which parts of the site were involved, and what normal visitor behaviour might look similar. If there is a safe next step, we recommend a small, reversible change and say what it risks and how to undo it. If we cannot recommend a change safely, we say so.
Any enforcement happens outside HWS, on systems you control, and the decision to apply it stays yours.
Then what
It does not stop at telling you
Knowing your catalogue is being copied is not much use on its own. Every reading can end in one named next step, and the step is always the smallest one that would help.
No actionNothing here needs doing. Said plainly, so a quiet week looks quiet rather than unexamined.
Watch for a weekSomething changed, but not enough to act on yet. It is being followed.
Ask crawlers to stay outA line for your robots.txt, naming the crawler. Polite, reversible, and honoured by the ones that honour it.
Slow the pattern downA rate rule for your own server or panel, so a crawl that is taking everything takes it slowly.
Refuse the patternA block rule, for when a pattern is clearly a copy and nothing softer has worked.
The rules set the ceiling, not the writing. How far up this ladder a reading may go is decided by fixed rules from what was measured. The sentence explaining it is written afterwards and can never push the step higher than the rules allowed.
Every step says what it risks and how to undo it. If there is no step that is safe to suggest, it says so instead of inventing one.
HWS never applies anything. It reads your logs and reports. Changing your server stays your decision, on your machine.
You set the posture once. Keep search engines and refuse AI training, search only, allow everything, or refuse everything automated. That changes what gets recommended, never what gets measured.
This is in the free version too. What Live adds is the thing that makes a recommendation trustworthy: weeks of history to say whether this is actually unusual for your site, and baselines from sites of the same size.
The free version
What HWS gives you for nothing
Install it on your own server and you get all of this, for as many sites as the machine can handle, with no account here and no expiry.
| Screen | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | People and machines as two separate numbers, the traffic chart, top pages, countries, and a written note on what changed. |
| Who fetched your site | Every crawler named, with requests made, pages taken, and whether it really is who it claims. Forged ones are marked. |
| Patterns | Sudden changes, spikes from one country, pages that have gone quiet, sources that are new this week. |
| Real time | Who is on the site now, updating every few seconds. |
| Session flow | The paths visitors take, drawn as a flow rather than a table of exits. |
| Geography | Where visitors are, on a globe and as a country list. |
| Pages and sources | Every page by share of traffic, and where people came from. AI tools appear here by name when somebody arrives from one. |
| Devices | Phones, tablets and computers, and which browsers. |
Addresses are hashed rather than stored and the tracking script is served by your own machine. Nothing is sent to us unless you add a Live key.
Free or paid
Free is not crippled
HWS on its own is a complete product. Live adds the things that need a service behind them.
| HWS alone | Bring your own AI key | Use HWS Live | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Written reading | Yes, from fixed rules | Yes, written through your model account | Yes, with a model we pay for |
| History and week-over-week change | No | No | Yes |
| Comparison to similar sites | No | No | Yes |
| Weekly email | No | No | Yes |
| Who pays for the model | No model cost | You pay your provider | We pay |
HWS alone
Free and runs on your server. It detects crawler activity and produces a plain-language reading from fixed rules. No account with us is required, and HWS does not enforce any recommendation.
Bring your own AI key
Uses your own Anthropic or OpenAI account to write the same reading on your server. Nothing is sent to us and you pay your model provider directly. The rules still set the maximum action a recommendation may take; the model writes the prose but cannot escalate it.
Use HWS Live
Adds stored history, week-over-week change, comparisons with similar sites, a weekly email, and a model we pay for. It does not enforce recommendations; any action remains under your control.
Price
One price, both plans
$10 / month
Monthly, cancel whenever you like.
$99 / year
Two months cheaper than paying monthly.
No account here. You pay, and the key is emailed to you. We keep the billing address and nothing else.
It is a key, not a login. You paste it into your own HWS install. How to connect your key.
Cancel in a click. Cancelling stops the key at the end of the period you have paid for.
What happens when you pay
- PayPal takes the payment. It accepts cards, so you do not need a PayPal account.
- A key is emailed to the address you paid with, usually within a minute.
- You paste it into your own HWS install, under Live. Nothing else changes, and your data stays where it is.
- The card on your dashboard changes from Not watching to watching, and the first reading follows.
It is a key, not a login. Cancel from the PayPal receipt whenever you like and the key simply stops at the end of the period you paid for.
Getting started
Install HWS, then add a Live key
HWS Live is not a website you log into — it is a key your own HWS install uses. HWS runs on your server, reads your logs there, and sends Live nothing but counts and crawler names.
curl -fsSL https://hws.jotnotes.com/releases/install.sh | sudo sh
It needs Python 3.9 or newer and systemd. Nothing else — the interface arrives already built, so there is no Node and no build step, and the release is a signed tarball on this site rather than a repository you need access to.
The installer checks the download against its SHA-256 and a signature before unpacking anything, and refuses an unsigned build. Then open it in a browser, create the first account, and paste a Live key under Intelligence.
Download 0.2.3 directly · What was signed · Connecting a Live key · Buy a Live key
The whole thing is open source, AGPL, and the code is public: github.com/SteveHigashi/hws. Read it before you run it. The tracking script you put on your pages is MIT, so it puts no conditions on your site.