: Eve of 2018: It is possible for third parties to know our web stats? As per today at the end of 2017, is it possible for someone (like a 3rd party organization or a competitor) to know

@Megan663

There are plenty of ways for 3rd parties to collect data and estimate your website stats.


If you don't use HTTPS any ISP can view every interaction of their customers with your site.
Even with HTTPS, ISPs can count DNS queries for your domain and see the number of connections to your site's IP address and know the bandwidth to it.
Traffic sources such as Google know how many visitors they send your way. Since Google is the majority of traffic for most sites, Google knows a lot about your traffic just based on that.
Browsers usually have features built in that report all page views to the browser maker
Many commonly installed browser plugins report usage of sites to the plug-in maker. That is how Alexa gets it's data whether or not you as a webmaster have a relationship with Alexa.
Any third party JavaScript you install on a page allows the third party to count that hit. That is how Google analytics works, but advertising or tools for your site you install this way commonly collect data about your site.


I say "estimate" because most of these ways give an incomplete accounting of your traffic. Third parties typically estimate and extrapolate your total traffic. You as a webmaster typically have the most accurate stats through analytics and server logs.

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