Live
Contents
The Live tab in Web Analytics is a real-time view of what's happening on your site right now: how many users are active, what pages they're on, where they came from, and what they're doing. Live shows events as they arrive, while PostHog is still processing, enriching, and storing them.
Note: Live is currently in alpha. Behavior and column layout may change before general availability.
What it shows
Live is a continuously updating feed of recent events. Each row includes:
- Timestamp – when the event was ingested
- Path – the URL or pathname requested
- Referrer and UTM parameters – where the visitor came from
- Country and device – derived from the request
Use the filter controls at the top of the tab to narrow the feed by host, path, referrer, or any other property. Filters apply to the live stream so you can isolate exactly what you want to watch.
Bot traffic
Live separates automated traffic from human visitors, so a crawl or scrape doesn't look like a launch. Requests are classified by user agent using the same bot and traffic detection as the rest of Web Analytics, and surfaced in two places:
- Bot requests per minute – a chart alongside the live users chart, so you can see automated load at a glance and tell a crawl apart from real traffic.
- Bot traffic tile – the bots hitting you right now, ranked by share of recent events and tagged with their category (AI agent, search crawler, automation, and so on). Select a row to open a breakdown for that specific bot.
This is handy when an AI crawler or scraper spikes your numbers and you want to confirm it's automated before reacting. To pull bots out of the rest of the live feed, filter on $virt_is_bot – see bot and traffic detection for the full set of properties.
Note: The live bot tiles are rolling out and may not be enabled for your project yet. Bot classification in queries and Product Analytics is available to everyone today.
When to use Live
Use Live when you're:
- Shipping a launch – watch traffic land on a new page or product as you announce it on Hacker News, Product Hunt, or a launch email.
- Running a paid campaign – see whether ad spend converts to real visits within minutes, not the next morning.
- Deploying frequently – if you ship multiple times a day, Live helps you catch regressions before your users do.
- Watching active users – see which pages signed-in users are on right now.
- Verifying an install – drop the PostHog snippet onto a site, hit a few pages yourself, and confirm events arrive within seconds.
Live vs. the rest of Web Analytics
Most analytics work splits into "right now" and "what happened". Live covers the first; the rest of Web Analytics covers the second.
| Live | Web Analytics dashboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | Seconds | Query-time, cached |
| Time range | Last few minutes | Hours, days, months |
| Best for | Launches, campaigns, monitoring, debugging | Trend analysis, reports, retrospectives |
| Aggregations | Stream of individual events | Visitors, sessions, paths, sources |
For deeper analysis like funnels, retention, or breakdowns, use Product Analytics or the SQL editor.
Limitations
- Recent traffic only – Live shows events from roughly the last few minutes. For longer windows, use the main Web Analytics dashboard.
- Sampling – high-volume sites may see the feed sampled to keep the stream readable. Aggregate dashboards are unaffected.
- No historical scroll – Live is a stream, not a paginated table. Use the events explorer or SQL editor to look further back.
Related
- Web Analytics dashboard – aggregated views over longer time ranges
- Bot and traffic detection – classify and filter bots, crawlers, and AI agents
- Troubleshooting – when events aren't showing up