Recently I had a look at my at my Cloudflare dashboard and was surprised to see that one of my websites, companieslogo.com was reportedly getting an insane amount of visitors.
In contrast, Google Analytics is correctly reporting only 2 to 3k visitors per day.
Cloudflare counts visitors differently
Cloudflare is counting any http(s) request from a single IP address as a unique visitors. Therefore every time someone loads an image from my website, it becomes a unique visitor on Cloudflare’s Dashboard and as it turned out many websites were linking images directly from my website.
Most of them are from India as the stats show:
Thus I found one Indian travel website that was including airline logos and an Indian job portal that was doing the same.
Another interesting thing was to search for companieslogo.com on Github which shows over 1000 instances where code is directly linking to a logo using my website.
Conclusions
I will have to be careful now if I want to change image urls as this could have a massive impact on some big websites at the other end of the world.
I do offer a paid API that provides a customer unique image URL and guarantees uptime, but in all cases that I discussed previously the image links were directly copy&pasted from the website itself.
Luckily this this cross site linking of images doesn’t come at a cost for me thanks to Cloudflare’s current pricing model, so I am quite neutral about it.
This also shows that one should not rely on Cloudflare to get a realistic number about your unique visitor count as Cloudflare’s numbers can be hugely inflated.