Referrer Analyzer

Where does your traffic actually come from? Referrer Analyzer extracts the referrer field from access logs and buckets each request as direct, search, social, internal or external — then ranks the top referring domains.

See the real mix behind your hit counters, not just the totals.

• Referrer buckets — direct/search/social/internal/external.
• Top domains — ranked by volume.
• Base host option — separates internal links.
• Normalized hosts — www. stripped.
• Unparsed counter — knows its limits.

1. Paste access-log lines where the request line is followed by a quoted referrer and a quoted user-agent — the tool reads the second-to-last quoted field on each line as the referrer, so it works with the standard combined format as well as custom formats that only quote those two fields.
2. Optionally add your base host (just the domain, e.g. example.com) so links from your own site — subdomains included — are classified as internal instead of being lumped into the generic external/other buckets.
3. Click Analyze. Every referrer is normalized to a bare host (lowercased, www. stripped, scheme and path removed) before it is bucketed and ranked, so https://www.Example.com/page and example.com count as the same referring domain.
4. Read the buckets, then the top domains list — the buckets give the channel mix, the domain list tells you exactly which sites or campaigns are driving it.
5. Copy the report for a marketing or SEO writeup.

Example 1 — Channel mix. If 40% of requests are direct and 35% are search, the referral traffic your PR or content team actively tracks is only a third of the real picture — direct traffic (bookmarks, typed URLs, links from apps that strip the referrer) is often the largest channel and easy to overlook.

Example 2 — Internal noise. Without a base host set, your own /admin → /dashboard navigation links look like high-value external traffic because their referrer is technically another page on your site. Set the base host and that same traffic is correctly classified as internal, so it stops inflating the "other" bucket and the top-domains list.

Example 3 — Campaign spikes. A burst of hits referred from bit.ly or another shortener surfaces at the top of the domain ranking the day a newsletter or social post goes out, letting you confirm a campaign actually drove traffic without cross-referencing a separate analytics dashboard.

Example 4 — Search vs. social split. The search and social buckets are keyword-matched against the referring host (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu for search; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, WhatsApp for social), so a sudden shift in the ratio between those two buckets is a fast way to tell whether a link is spreading organically on social media or getting picked up by search.

• Traffic provenance — real sources.
• Internal vs external — clean attribution.
• Domain ranking — top referrers.
• Private — all in-browser.