You Can’t Design a Web You Can’t See
The last time I mentioned Google Analytics to a room of designers, the response was immediate.
"Whenever I look in there I'm like, oh my god."
If you've ever felt like that, this is for you.
I've been talking a lot lately about relationships and the web around a website. Not the internet in the abstract. The actual web around your work.
The people who point to you. The sites that mention you. The directories that include you. The clients who refer you. The creators, collaborators, tools, search engines, and platforms that help someone find their way to your business.
Your website is one node.
Your business grows through the web around it.
Most of that web is invisible to the people living inside it. The data's been there the whole time, sitting in your GA4. But GA4 gives you a list of names with numbers next to them. A list is not a web.
It doesn't show you what's warm, what's cold, what's strong, what's shallow, what's mutual, or what's merely passing traffic through.
So you open the dashboard, sense you should be taking something from it, and close the tab.
I've done it. You've done it.
That's why I built The Referral Web.
It takes your GA4 referral data and turns it into a visual map. Your site sits at the center. Every referrer becomes a node around it.
Some of those nodes are real relationships. A peer site. A collaborator. A creator who points people toward your work.
Others are infrastructure. Algorithms, search engines, AI tools, social platforms, apps, systems that pass your link along.
Both matter.
They don't mean the same thing.
You can't design a web you can't see.
Drop in your GA4 referral data and you'll see the web your business actually lives inside.
The nodes. The weights. The shape.
The tool doesn’t tell you what to do.
It shows you what you have.
What you do with it depends on what you see.
