What it does

Compare a metric between two periods. Returns a_value, b_value, absolute_change and percent_change. percent_change is a percentage relative to period_b: 21.9 means +21.9%, -8.0 means -8.0% (null when b_value is 0). metric=pageviews includes AI-mediated human browsing (ai_user_action); metric=sessions and metric=visitors are browser-only (server-side-ingested rows carry no session or visitor id). metric=visitors is always 0 on privacy_mode=strict sites (no visitor IDs computed by design) — use sessions there. metric=events compares one named event (pass event_name), e.g. conversions this month vs last; it counts rows like pageviews, so it includes AI-mediated human browsing.

Example prompts

Ask:

"Compare last 7 days vs the previous 7 days for mysite.com."
"How does this month look compared to last month?"
"Pageviews trend week-over-week."

A typical response:

Pageviews, last 7 days vs previous 7 days:

  Period A (May 12-18):  42,180
  Period B (May 5-11):   31,420
  Change:                +34.2%
  Absolute delta:        +10,760

  Best day in A:  May 16 (8,114 views)
  Best day in B:  May 9  (5,847 views)

Returns a single object with both period values, the percentage and absolute delta, and bucket info if the period is sub-week granularity.

Period strings the parser understands:

  • today, yesterday
  • last_7_days, last_30_days, last_90_days, last_12_months
  • YYYY-MM-DD..YYYY-MM-DD for explicit ranges (inclusive)

There are no "previous week" or "last month" keywords. For those, the agent computes the dates and passes an explicit range, e.g. period_b: "2026-05-05..2026-05-11".

Volume metric: counts include AI-mediated human browsing. If you want to compare only direct browser traffic, you can filter using traffic_class_breakdown for each period instead.

Works for a single custom event too: pass metric: "events" plus event_name to compare, say, this month's inquiries against last month's.

Common workflow: pair with top_pages on both periods to identify pages driving the change.

Arguments

Name Type Required Description / Default
site_id string required Site identifier from list_sites (8-character base32, e.g. 'wjxayhdd').
metric string
enum: pageviews, visitors, sessions, events		 required Metric to compare across periods. pageviews includes AI-mediated human browsing; sessions and visitors are browser-only. 'events' counts occurrences of the single event named in event_name (row count, like pageviews).
period_a string required First period (same format as `period` elsewhere). Returned as a_value.
period_b string required Second period to compare against (same format). Returned as b_value.
event_name string optional Required when metric=events, rejected with any other metric. Case-sensitive event name — use list_events to discover the names this site actually sends. Counts match the total_count event_details reports for the same event and period (volume metric, includes AI-mediated human browsing).

How to call it directly

If you're integrating from your own code rather than a chat client, this is the JSON-RPC payload:

curl -X POST https://mcp-analytics.com/mcp \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "tools/call",
  "params": {
    "name": "compare_periods",
    "arguments": {
      "site_id": "abc12345",
      "metric": "pageviews",
      "period_a": "last_7_days",
      "period_b": "previous_7_days"
    }
  }
}'

Token comes from /settings after you sign up. Replace any required arguments above.

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