- GA4 often misses a significant portion of traffic due to ad blockers, bots, consent banners, and Safari’s tracking protections.
- Cloudflare captures all requests passing through its edge, while GA4 only counts pageviews when JavaScript executes and reports back.
- The author built a dashboard using Papercrane and Claude Code to directly compare Cloudflare requests vs. GA4 pageviews for the top 10 landing pages.
- Key filters for fair comparison include requestSource 'eyeball', edgeResponseStatus 200, method GET, and exact clientRequestPath.
- Results showed GA4 recorded about 48% of Cloudflare requests across the top 10 landing pages over seven days.
- Page-by-page ratios varied widely, with some pages near parity and others above 1.0, indicating edge cases like bots or path mismatches.
- Caveats include that requests are not pageviews, paths can differ between systems, and GA4's session-scoped dimensions affect comparisons.
- The dashboard serves as a directional signal, not a definitive census, and is useful for spotting anomalies like bot swarms or broken instrumentation.
- The entire build took about 10 minutes and can be replicated on any site using the provided prompts and instructions.