Have you checked your Referrer-Policy?

Prune your follows initial build was sponsored by Xata. As part of the agreement, the site has a "powered by Xata" notice on every page linking to xata.io, in addition to a link to my site.

Looking at my our analytics, I found it weird that no one was clicking through from pruneyourfollows.com to queen.raae.codes or vice versa.

As I imagine tracking traffic from PYF is part of Xata's evaluation of our collab, I got a little worried 😬

Turns out the default Referrer-Policy is same-origin for Gatsby Cloud, Netlify, and probably most other similar platforms.

same-origin: Send the origin, path, and query string for same-origin requests. Don't send the Referer header for cross-origin requests. mdn web docs

The only referrals tracked on for example, queen.raae.codes, were from itself to itself 🤦‍♀️

After reading Referer and Referrer-Policy best practices from web.dev I landed on using strict-origin-when-cross-origin.

It will send along the origin (https://pruneyourfollows.com) but not the full URL (https://pruneyourfollows.com/app?example=possible-secret).

How to set the Referrer-Policy on Gatsby Cloud

To make strict-origin-when-cross-origin the policy across the board configure the gatsby-plugin-gatsby-cloud like so:

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    {
      resolve: `gatsby-plugin-gatsby-cloud`,
      options: {
        headers: {
          "/*": ["Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin"],
        },
      },
    },
  ],
};

And voila, I finally saw referrer information from pruneyourfollows.com to queen.raae.codes and vice versa.

All the best,
Queen Raae

PS. Since we do not have access to Xata's analytics, we would also like to track clicks on their link on our side, and we'll do that on tonight's treasure hunt Track outgoing links with Fathom for Prune your follows.