The question worth answering
Did this get read? For a proposal, a report, a spec sent to one person, that is real signal — it tells you whether to follow up, rewrite, or move on. The author deserves an answer.
The answer that goes too far
Building a profile of the reader: who they are, what else they looked at, when they came back. That is surveillance dressed as analytics, and for a link you sent to one person it is both unnecessary and a liability. The reader did not sign up to be a data point.
What this deployment records
| Signal | What it tells the author |
|---|---|
| Opens and unique viewers | Whether, and roughly how widely, it was seen |
| Dwell time | How long the page held attention |
| Scroll depth | How far down they got |
| Read-to-end | Whether they reached the bottom |
| A ten-segment heatmap | Which parts held attention and which were skipped |
Every one of these is about the page, aggregated. None of them is a dossier on a person.
What it refuses to build
- No per-reader identity — the viewer never logs in and is never asked to.
- No cross-page profile that follows someone around the deployment.
- No referrer leak:
no-referrermeans the link does not carry where they came from.
Reading it back
The author pulls aggregates for their own page, through the same account that owns it:
curl -s https://read.botook.ai/sites/<id>/engagement \
-H "Authorization: Bearer <key>" | jq .The shape that comes back is counts and distributions — not a list of readers.
Why the aggregate is enough
The decisions an author actually makes — follow up, rewrite, drop it — need the aggregate, not the identity. “Read to the end” and “opened and bounced” are different actions for you to take; who did which rarely changes the decision, and recording it changes what the reader is owed.
Can I see exactly who opened my link?
No — and that is deliberate. You get aggregates for the page (opens, dwell, scroll, read-to-end, a heatmap), not a per-reader identity. The reader was sent a link, not enrolled in tracking.
Is there any per-visitor tracking at all?
Unique viewers are counted so “opened once” and “opened widely” are distinguishable, but there is no identity attached and no profile that follows a reader across pages.