# Plausible filters agents out. We count them in.

> Plausible and Punchline agree on privacy: no cookies, no consent banner. They disagree on agents. Plausible treats them as noise to remove; Punchline treats them as an audience to understand.

[See your whole funnel](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/reveal)

## Side by side

| | Punchline | Plausible |
|---|---|---|
| AI agents and crawlers | Sees them and labels each one: crawler, agent reading for a person, fetcher or impostor, with its operator. [Concepts](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/docs/concepts) | Known AI crawlers and other bots are filtered from your analytics, by user agent, referrer spam lists, data-center IP ranges and traffic patterns. [1] |
| Why a visit was labelled | Every label lists the rules that fired and how sure it is (verified, declared, inferred). [How it works](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/how-it-works) | Filtering is aggressive by design, and Plausible says false positives happen occasionally. [2] |
| People sent by AI assistants | A channel of its own (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot), with conversions and a survey estimate of influence links miss. | An AI Assistants channel since June 2026 (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and similar), with historical data reclassified. [3] |
| Cookies | None. Nothing is stored on visitors' devices; IP addresses and user agents are used in memory and discarded. [Privacy](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/privacy) | None; a random string reset every 24 hours counts unique visitors. [4] |
| Agents that never run JavaScript | Yes, with an edge install (Next.js or Cloudflare): agents that never run JavaScript are counted. | We couldn't find this in its documentation. |
| Companies researching you | Accounts: which companies' agents researched you, by intent, pushed to HubSpot or Salesforce. [Accounts](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/docs/accounts) | We couldn't find this in its documentation. |

Claims about Plausible are from its own published material, checked October 2026:

1. [Plausible: AI traffic analytics](https://plausible.io/track-ai-traffic)
2. [Plausible: Dashboard FAQ](https://plausible.io/docs/dashboard-faq)
3. [Plausible: What's new (changelog)](https://plausible.io/changelog)
4. [Plausible: Cookieless web analytics](https://plausible.io/cookieless-web-analytics)

## Credit where it's due

- A simple, fast dashboard that's easy to share with a whole team.
- Strong on privacy, with a long track record.
- An AI Assistants channel for people sent by assistants.

## Punchline next to Plausible

If you like Plausible for people's traffic, keep it. Punchline adds the half of the funnel it filters out: which agents read your site, what they read, and which companies and conversions they led to.

[See what your analytics is missing](https://www.punchlineanalytics.com/reveal)