Pro plan

Reader identities and live presence

Distinguish individual reading sessions and see who is actively reading right now.

EveryPage identifies readers pseudonymously, so a document's readership resolves into individual sessions and repeat visitors rather than a single total. Live presence reports which of those sessions are open right now. Both are Pro features; the underlying sessions are recorded on every plan.

Pseudonymous identities

A reader identity is a salted HMAC of the visitor's IP address. The address is used to compute the hash and then discarded — it is never written to the database — so the same visitor maps to the same reader id on a later visit without EveryPage holding their IP. Because the input is the IP, visitors sharing one address (an office network, a mobile carrier NAT) collapse into a single reader, and one visitor on several networks appears as several readers.

The pseudonymous ID appears in your readership session list as "Reader #N" alongside the view timestamp, source, device, browser, country, pages viewed, and time spent. If a reader has already been named (see below), their name or email replaces the ID.

A session is tagged "Returning" when the same reader has an earlier session on the same document. That comparison is per document: a reader who has read three of your files, but this one only once, is not returning here.

Named readers: three paths

A reader becomes named when they tell you who they are. EveryPage supports three routes:

Email gate. When you enable email gates and lead capture, viewers submit an email address before the document is served. The validated address is stored on the view session and shown in place of the pseudonymous ID. If the gate uses a custom form rather than a plain email prompt, the address still names the session; the other fields the form collected (name, company, and so on) land in the separate "Captured contacts" table, not in the session row.

Email invites. Tracked links from email invites carry an ?i= recipient token. A session opened through a valid token is attributed to that invitee's name and email from your invite list and flagged "Invited"; the invitee identity wins over any gate-captured address. A valid invite also satisfies the email gate, so an invited reader is never prompted.

Link variants. Each link variant can carry an optional recipient label. Sessions record the variant they arrived through, and the label names them in the Pro variants breakdown and in file.viewed / file.downloaded webhook payloads. The label does not replace the reader ID in the session list — variant attribution is per link, not per reader.

The three routes are independent. A gate captures anyone who opens the document; invites and variants name a recipient only where you supplied one.

Session data

The "Recent views" table holds the 20 most recent sessions, newest first. Each row carries:

  • Reader identity — invitee name and email, captured gate email, or the pseudonymous "Reader #N"
  • Started at — when the session began
  • Time spent — total reading time reported by the viewer
  • Pages viewed — how many distinct pages the reader opened
  • Device — desktop, mobile, tablet or bot
  • Browser — resolved from the User-Agent
  • Country — resolved by in-flight IP lookup
  • Source — link, qr, email or embed
  • Flags — "Invited" for sessions that came through an invite token, "Returning" for a repeat reader of this document

CSV export covers every session for the document, not just the most recent 20, and adds the operating system column that the table does not show.

Live presence

The readership page shows a "● N reading now" badge while at least one reader is active. A session counts as active when it started within the last five minutes and has not yet reported its end, so a reader who closes the tab drops out on their final beacon, and one who leaves the document open ages out of the count after five minutes. The page polls the count every 30 seconds from a dedicated endpoint (/readership/live). Live presence is Pro-only, like the session list.

Retroactive history

Capture is not tiered. Sessions, readers, page turns, and gate submissions are recorded on free, Basic and Pro alike; only the owner-facing reports are gated. Free accounts see the summary cards, Basic adds trends, the funnel, page stats and the breakdowns, and Pro adds the per-session identities, live presence, captured contacts and CSV export.

Because the rows were always written, upgrading is retroactive: the sessions recorded while the document sat on a lower plan appear as soon as the plan allows them. The same applies in reverse — a downgrade hides the reports, it does not delete the history.