Citealytics vs Plausible — what's the same, what's different.

Both tools are cookieless, both replace a consent banner with a design decision, and both give you one script tag and a simple dashboard. The difference is depth of AI attribution: Plausible groups assistant traffic into a channel, Citealytics classifies it per engine and tracks which pages get cited.

Side-by-side

Capability	Citealytics	Plausible
Cookieless by design
No consent banner required
Single-line script install
Event-volume based pricing
AI-search channel grouping
Per-engine AI split (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot)
Public answer-engine signature registry
Cited landing pages with the originating question
AI Visibility Score per page
AI citation alerts

Same

Cookieless collection with no browser storage and no consent banner.
Data residency you choose — EU or US.
A single script tag, installed once, with no tag manager required.
Monthly event caps rather than per-seat pricing.

Different

AI attribution depth: a channel group versus a per-engine classification pipeline.
Citation monitoring: which specific pages assistants cite, and when.
AI Visibility Score per page, so you can rank content by answer-engine reach.
Alerting on AI citations rather than on overall traffic only.

An honest comparison

Privacy posture. There is no meaningful gap here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Both products avoid cookies, avoid cross-site identifiers, and are built so the consent question does not arise. If privacy is your only criterion, pick on price and interface.

Dashboard. Plausible's dashboard is deliberately minimal and famously easy to hand to a non-technical stakeholder. Citealytics is denser: the default view is an AI-versus-human split with per-engine breakdowns, which is more information than a general-purpose analytics user needs and exactly what an AI-visibility owner wants.

AI attribution depth. This is the real difference. A channel grouping tells you that assistant traffic exists. Citealytics classifies each request against a maintained registry of crawler tokens, regexes and IP ranges, separates crawler fetches from human referrals, and records the landing page that was cited. That is the difference between knowing a channel exists and being able to act on it.

Pricing. Both price on monthly event volume rather than seats, and both have a free tier for small sites. Citealytics starts free at 10,000 events per month. Check Plausible's current published pricing directly on their site rather than trusting a competitor's page — including this one.

Frequently asked questions

Is Plausible cookieless too?

Yes. Plausible documents a cookie-free, privacy-focused measurement model, which is why the privacy posture of both tools is broadly comparable.

Does Plausible show AI traffic?

Plausible documents an AI-search channel grouping that separates assistant referrals from other referrers. It is a channel view rather than per-engine citation history.

What does Citealytics add?

Server-side classification against a public registry of answer-engine signatures, per-engine splits, cited landing pages, and an AI Visibility Score per page.

Can I run both?

Yes. Both are single-line scripts with no cookies, so running them side by side for a month is a reasonable way to compare classification before you commit.

Which one is cheaper?

Both start free. Citealytics is $19/month at 100k events; check Plausible's published pricing directly, since competitor pages go stale fast. See /pricing for our current numbers.

How hard is it to migrate?

You do not have to migrate. Add the Citealytics tag alongside your existing script, compare a month of data, and remove whichever one you no longer need.

Measure the AI traffic your analytics is hiding.

One line of script, no cookies, no consent banner. Citealytics classifies every visit against a registry of answer-engine signatures and shows which pages get cited.

Start free — 10k events/mo →