Content Reach

See which sections of each page readers actually reach, how long each holds the reader's position, and which controls they use — without cookies, coordinates, or any record of who anyone is.

Page views tell you a page was opened. They don’t tell you whether anyone got as far as the install command. Content Reach answers that: for every page, which of its sections came into view, how long each held the reader’s position, and which controls readers actually used.

It reports on your page’s own sections — the headings you already wrote, plus any region you mark yourself — and never on screen coordinates. There is no cookie, no fingerprint, no visitor id, and nothing that survives closing a browser tab.

Turn it on

contentReach:
  enabled: true

Rebuild, and the Content Reach tab in your Aardvark cloud dashboard starts filling in. The full set of options:

What gets measured

Five things, and it is worth being precise about each — the numbers are only useful if you know exactly what they count.

Visible time

How long the page was in the foreground of a visible tab. Time stops when the reader switches tabs or minimizes the window, and stops again after 60 seconds with no scroll, click, keypress, or focus. Capped at one hour per page view.

Sections reached

A section counts as reached when it is at least half visible for at least one continuous second. “Half visible” means either half of the section, or half of the screen — the second case matters, because a section longer than the viewport can never be half of itself while filling the reader’s entire screen.

Sections inside a collapsed accordion or an inactive tab are never reached, which is correct: nobody could see them.

Section dwell

How long each section spent as the one the reader was positioned on — the same “you are here” rule that highlights an entry in the On this page sidebar. Exactly one section is current at a time, so the per-section times always add up to no more than the page’s visible time. Capped at ten minutes per section per page view, and the dashboard reports the median rather than the average so one tab left open overnight can’t define a section’s number.

Time spent above the first heading is credited to a synthetic intro section, so a page’s opening paragraphs aren’t silently attributed to the first heading below them.

By default Content Reach measures h2 and h3 anchors (the same band the table of contents uses). If you enable search.sections with a wider or narrower heading band, Reach uses that band too — so the heat strip denominator agrees with the anchors search indexes. Pages with more than 40 sections measure only the first 40 in document order (matching the per-beacon wire cap); the completion denominator is that measured set, so a reader who covers every tracked band can still reach 100%.

A section can be reached with zero dwell, and that isn’t a bug — the two measures answer different questions. A long section can fill a reader’s screen (so it is reached) while its heading is still below the top of the viewport, in which case the reader is still positioned in the section above it and the time belongs there. Expect the sections a reader stopped short of to show reach without dwell.

Once a reader is at the bottom of the page, the time goes to the last section, since that is what they are looking at and what the On this page sidebar highlights. On a short page whose final sections all fit on screen at once, that means the last one absorbs the tail of the visit. Dwell is most informative on pages long enough that sections scroll past one at a time.

Last section reached

The furthest section each page view got to. This is a proxy, and the dashboard labels it as one: a reader who jumps to the bottom of the page from the table of contents sets it exactly like one who read all the way down. It is where readers got to, not where they gave up.

Deliberate actions

Five fixed kinds, counted per section:

• Copy code — the copy button on a code block was pressed. Never what was copied.
• CTA clicks — a link or button inside a region you marked.
• TOC jumps — an “On this page” link was clicked, counted against the section it points to.
• Search arrivals — the reader landed on this section from your site’s search box. No query text crosses over.
• Expansions — an accordion or tab control in this section was used.

The list is closed. Adding a sixth kind takes a new Aardvark release; nothing your pages contain can invent one.

What it is not

Content Reach measures visibility and deliberate interaction. That is all it can measure, and the wording throughout the product reflects it:

• A section being on screen is not evidence anyone read it — a reader can scroll past with their eyes closed.
• Dwell time is not attention. Someone can leave a section on screen while doing something else; the idle cutoff removes the worst of that, not all of it.
• Nothing here measures comprehension, gaze, or emotion, and no combination of these numbers can be turned into such a claim.
• “Last section reached” is not a drop-off point.

If you need to know whether people understood something, ask them — reader surveys and page ratings are the tools for that.

Privacy

The design constraint is that Content Reach must be useful without knowing anything about who anyone is.

Never collected: cursor or scroll coordinates, screen recordings, page snapshots, element or clipboard text, form values, search terms, referrers, user agents, IP-derived data, or any identifier that outlives a browser tab.

Collected: the page path, the ids of the sections that came into view, how long each held the reader’s position, and counts for the five actions above.

Readers are grouped by a random tab session id held in sessionStorage. It is minted per tab, dies when the tab closes, and is deliberately separate from the one search analytics uses, so no identifier links a Content Reach session to a search session. There is no “unique visitors” number anywhere in the dashboard, because there is nothing to count.

No query text ever reaches Content Reach — a search arrival hands over the fact that it happened and nothing else. What the two do share is the page path and roughly the time, because both are per-page analytics and neither is useful without them. On a quiet page, someone who can read both datasets could therefore line a search up with a Content Reach session even though nothing joins them. If that inference matters for your site, keep the terms out of storage with search.analytics.store_terms: false — the funnel still works, and there is then no query text on either side to line up.

Readers with Do Not Track or Save-Data enabled send nothing at all.

Data is deleted after 90 days by default. Nothing derived outlives it — there are no long-lived summaries that keep a copy after the raw rows expire.

Consent

Content Reach uses your site’s existing consent signal; Aardvark ships no cookie banner of its own. With requireConsent: true, nothing is recorded until your banner sets window.aardvarkConsent and dispatches an event:

window.aardvarkConsent = true;
window.dispatchEvent(new Event('aardvark-consent'));

This is the same contract reader surveys use. Set aardvarkConsent to a function if the answer can change. Until then the gate fails closed — no signal means no recording — and a reader who accepts partway down a page is measured from that moment on, never retroactively.

Whether you need this depends on your jurisdiction and your own legal advice. Content Reach sets no cookies and stores no personal data, but “no consent needed” is not a conclusion Aardvark can reach on your behalf. Wire up a banner with integrations.custom and turn requireConsent on if in doubt.

Mark a high-value region

Headings become sections automatically. For the blocks that matter most but aren’t headings — an install command, an auth step, a “Try it now” — wrap them in {% target %}:

{% target id="install-cli" %}
```bash
npm install -g aardvark
```
{% endTarget %}

The id is a lowercase slug, in the same namespace as a heading anchor, so the dashboard shows one ordered list of sections rather than two. A malformed id warns at build time and renders the content unwrapped — you lose the measurement, never the content.

For a single component instead of a region, no new syntax is needed:

{% button url="/signup" attr={"data-aardvark-target": "signup-cta"} %}Start free{% endButton %}

Section discovery is a single snapshot taken once the page has mounted, so the marked element has to exist by then. That holds for {% target %} and for any component that renders a real element — but a handful of Mantine components apply attr several frames after mounting, and a target on one of those can miss the snapshot and go unmeasured. Nothing breaks and no warning fires; the region simply never appears in the dashboard. If a marked region doesn’t show up, wrap it in {% target %} instead of marking the component.

Full reference: Target.

Reading the dashboard

The Content Reach tab opens on the aggregate: page views, tab sessions, average visible time, and average sections reached, followed by a table of pages sorted by traffic with a reach-completion bar. Export it as CSV from the header.

Click any page for its section heat strip — one band per section in document order, shaded by either reach or median dwell, with the action counts beside it. Every band prints its own number and carries a screen-reader label, so the strip reads correctly in greyscale and with assistive technology.

If you rename or remove a heading, its recorded history stays for the rest of the retention window — those numbers really happened. The strip keeps showing them, but they are counted separately and called out as no longer part of the page, so a heading you renamed last week never reads as a section of today’s page that nobody reached.

It is a section strip rather than a pixel heatmap by design. Aardvark knows which section of your page a reader reached; it deliberately does not know where anything was on their screen, and a pixel map would require exactly the coordinate tracking this feature refuses to do.

Turning it off

Remove the contentReach block (or set enabled: false) and rebuild. The client stops shipping with your site immediately, and existing data ages out on the normal 90-day window.