Timezones
The three clocks: your dashboard timezone, a site's reporting timezone, and the share page's viewer picker.
One clock per site, and a reader's own view
Timezones trip up every analytics tool, so it is worth knowing which clock cuts which day. Every site has exactly one reporting timezone, and everything about the site is counted on it. A reader can look at the same numbers on another clock without changing anything.
| Clock | Set where | Governs |
|---|---|---|
| The site's reporting timezone | Site Settings → General | Every reading of the site: the dashboard, widgets, the public share page, the weekly digest and the answers the MCP server and the assistant give. Every site has one. A new site starts on the timezone of the browser that created it, and an owner or admin can change it at any time. |
| A reader's pick | The timezone button in the dashboard header, or on the share page | That reader's view only: the same data, cut on their clock. It is remembered for the tab and writes nothing, so nobody else's view moves. |
| Your account timezone | Account → Preferences | A fallback only, for the moment before a site's own timezone has loaded. It does not override the site's clock. |
Why the site owns the clock
Today, this week and this month have to mean the same thing to everyone who reads a site, or two teammates comparing numbers are comparing different days. So the site declares its clock once, and widgets, share links and the digest, which cannot ask their reader anything, all use it. A reader who wants their own day can still switch the view from the header, with a picker that searches by country, city or timezone name.
Every timezone works
Any IANA timezone can be a reporting timezone, including the ones whose offset is not a whole hour, such as India (+05:30) and Nepal (+05:45). Days are assembled from fifteen-minute buckets, so a local midnight at half past or quarter to the hour is cut exactly, and daylight saving days come out 23 or 25 hours long, as they are.
One clock that never moves
Visitor rotation is always UTC midnight
The anonymous visitor identifier rotates at UTC midnight everywhere, deliberately. Letting a site pick the rotation clock would split visitors at local midnight and make sites comparable by their timezone choice.
So reporting clocks change how numbers are bucketed, never how people are counted. The full construction is in the Privacy Policy.