How we built AI-powered analytics into Sanity CMS and why it matters for your website

Standard analytics platforms, Google Analytics (GA4), Search Console and SEMRush are built for analysts. They're powerful, they're detailed, and they require significant expertise to interpret correctly. For a founder running a growing business, spending time each week interpreting GA4 dashboards is not a realistic use of time.

The typical workaround is a monthly agency report. You get a PDF, some charts, a few paragraphs of commentary, and maybe a list of recommendations. But by the time the report arrives, the data is a month old. And the recommendations are often generic “consider publishing more content using keyword X” rather than specific to what's actually happening on your site.

There's also the switching problem. Your content lives in your CMS. Your analytics live somewhere else. Your keyword data lives somewhere else again. Making sense of all three requires pulling information from multiple places and checking them all manually. Most business owners don't have time for that, so they don't do it, or the agency reports they do get have to be uploaded to ai to be summarised.

Our system pulls data from Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and SEMrush into Sanity on a weekly basis. An AI layer then processes that data and generates a structured weekly report written in a way we can all understand, specific to the client's site, and focused on what changed and why.

The report appears directly inside the Sanity Studio, the same interface clients use to edit their content. There's no separate dashboard to log into, no PDF to wait for. The insights appear alongside the content they relate to. If a blog post is underperforming, that insight shows up in the system where the post lives. The client can read the recommendation and act on it immediately.

Each weekly report includes: a traffic summary with context (not just the number, but whether it's up, down, and why), top-performing pages, underperforming pages with specific suggestions, content gaps based on keyword data, and a recommended content plan for the coming week. It's actionable by design.

One of the things that makes this system genuinely different is that it tracks AI visibility alongside traditional search performance. We run regular probe queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini asking the questions a client's ideal customer would ask and record whether the business gets recommended.

That data feeds into the weekly report alongside the Google data. So clients can see not just how they're ranking on Google, but whether they're appearing in AI tool recommendations for the queries that matter most to their business. As AI search becomes a more significant discovery channel, this visibility data becomes increasingly valuable.

Most agencies aren't measuring this at all. The businesses we work with are getting a picture of their digital visibility that most of their competitors simply don't have without hiring a marketing manager.

We made a deliberate decision to build this inside Sanity rather than as a standalone dashboard or separate tool. The reason is simple: the closer the insight is to the content, the more likely it is to be acted on. If you have to open three tabs to go from “this page is underperforming” to “here's how to improve it” to “ok I've updated it”, most people don't complete that journey. When the insight and the editor are in the same place, they do.

It also means the system benefits from Sanity's structured content model. Because content is stored as defined fields not visual components the AI layer can understand what type of content it's looking at, cross-reference it with traffic data, and make specific recommendations. It can say “your case studies are getting traffic but not generating enquiries… here's why” rather than just “some pages could be improved”.

We're continuing to develop this system and it's becoming a more significant part of what we offer with every project. The goal is to give founders and marketing leaders a tool that makes their website genuinely smarter over time not just a brochure that sits there and doesn't change.

If you're considering a new website, the choice of CMS matters more than most people realise, not just for how it works on day one, but for what it enables over time. A platform that separates your content from your design, structures your data clearly, and integrates with your analytics and AI tools is a fundamentally different asset from a template-based website on a visual builder.

The websites we build on Sanity aren't just faster and better structured than page builder alternatives. They're connected to an analytics and AI layer that helps clients understand what's working, surface content opportunities, and make better decisions about where to invest. That's what a website should be: a business tool, not just a business card.

If you want to see how it works in practice, we're happy to show you.