Real-Time Monitoring: Live Site Stats

What Is Real-Time Monitoring?

Real-Time Monitoring (RTM) gives you a live view of what is happening on your website right now. It tracks visitors as they browse, records performance data as pages load, catches JavaScript errors as they occur, and identifies when AI bots are crawling your site.

It is included on every plan.

Unlike standard analytics tools that report on what happened yesterday, RTM shows you what is happening in the moment — making it much easier to spot and respond to problems quickly.

Setting Up RTM

To activate Real-Time Monitoring, you need to add the RnkRocket tracking script to your website. To find your script:

Go to Real-Time Monitoring in your dashboard
Click Setup or Get Tracking Script
Copy the snippet provided

Add the snippet to every page of your website, ideally just before the closing </head> tag. If you use a website builder (such as WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace), there will be a settings area where you can paste scripts into the site header.

Once the script is live, RTM will start collecting data immediately. It can take a few minutes for the first events to appear in your dashboard.

The Events Stream

The events stream is a live feed showing activity on your site as it happens. Each event shows:

The page being visited
The visitor's location (country and region)
The device type (desktop, tablet, or mobile)
The source of the visit (Google, direct, referral, etc.)
Any errors or performance issues recorded during that visit

The stream updates in real time so you can watch activity as it unfolds — useful for spotting issues during a product launch, a sale, or after publishing new content.

Performance Metrics

RTM records performance data for every page load, including:

Time to First Byte (TTFB): How quickly your server starts responding
First Contentful Paint (FCP): When the first content appears on screen
Page load time: Total time to fully load the page
Resource errors: Missing images, failed scripts, or broken stylesheets

You can filter by page, device type, or time period to identify which parts of your site are performing well and which need attention.

Core Web Vitals (CWV)

Core Web Vitals are the three performance metrics Google uses to assess user experience on your website. For more detail, see our Core Web Vitals guide. RTM tracks all three in real time from actual visitor data:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly the main content of a page loads. Google's target is under 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID): How quickly the page responds when a user tries to interact with it. Target: under 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the page layout jumps around while loading. Target: under 0.1.

Pages that consistently fail Core Web Vitals thresholds may be penalised in Google rankings. RTM lets you spot these issues from real user sessions, not just lab tests.

Error Detection

RTM automatically captures JavaScript errors and resource loading failures as they happen. Each error record includes:

The error message
The page where it occurred
The browser and device of the affected visitor
A timestamp

Catching errors in real time means you can fix them before they affect many users — rather than finding out days later when someone complains or you notice a drop in conversions.

AI Bot Identification

RTM identifies and labels traffic from AI crawlers — including Googlebot, GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and others. Knowing which AI tools are crawling your site helps you understand your GEO visibility and whether your content is being accessed by the tools that matter to your business.

AI bot data is shown separately from human visitor traffic so it does not skew your analytics.

If you need help with setup, see our common issues guide or contact support.