A dashboard answers the questions it was built for. You pick a range, open a tab, and read the card. The harder questions sit between the cards: why last Tuesday was busy, which posts are slipping, whether the readers from a newsletter stayed for a second page. Answering those means clicking through several reports and putting the pieces together yourself.
An AI assistant can do that part. Since version 0.12.0, Vireo Analytics lets Claude, Cursor and other assistants read your analytics directly, so you can ask the question in plain language and get an answer built from your own numbers.
What MCP is
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard AI assistants use to plug into other software. A program that speaks it publishes a list of tools, each with a short description of what it answers. The assistant reads that list, decides which tools fit your question, calls them, and writes its answer from what comes back. Vireo’s tools are its reports: top pages, referrers, Search Console queries, what changed against the previous period, and the rest of the dashboard.
Connect an assistant
You need an administrator login, a few minutes, and an assistant that supports MCP. Claude Code, Claude Desktop and Cursor all do.
- In WordPress, go to Users, Profile, and create an application password named after the assistant. WordPress shows it once, so copy it.
- Go to Vireo Analytics, Settings, open the Search Console & API tab, and find “Connect an AI assistant”. It shows your MCP endpoint and ready-made setup for Claude Code, and for Claude Desktop, Cursor and others, with your username filled in.
- Copy the setup for your assistant, paste the application password where it says
APP_PASSWORD, and add it to the assistant. - Restart the assistant and ask it something.
Connect Claude or Cursor to your site walks through each assistant step by step, and covers the usual errors.
Questions worth asking
The best questions are the ones that would take several reports to answer by hand. A few to start with:
How is the site doing this month compared with last month? The assistant reads what changed against the previous period: the shift in pageviews, the pages and sources behind it, and any warnings, such as tracking having stopped on a day.
Why did traffic jump on the 3rd? It can look at the days around it, the sources that sent readers that day, and any chart notes you added, and tell you whether one post or one referrer explains it.
What did people search on Google to find my pricing page? With Search Console connected, it reads the searches that showed that page, with clicks and average position. Without it, the tool says so and the assistant should tell you.
Which posts got the most views last week, and where did their readers come from? It combines the top pages with the referrers behind them, so you see that a post was popular because one forum linked to it.
How much do AI crawlers take from my site, compared with the readers AI assistants send back? It reads the same figures as the AI assistants card. What AI crawlers take from your site explains what those numbers mean.
Do I have broken links? It reads your missing pages, split into broken links, reached from one of your own pages and listed with the page that links there, and probes from scanners and outside links. You fix the first group and can mostly ignore the second.
Follow-ups work the way they would with a colleague. “Same question for last year.” “Just the last seven days.” “Which of those posts ranks lowest in Google?” The assistant calls the tools again with the new range or filter.
What Vireo Pro adds
With an active Vireo Pro license, the same connection answers questions about money and behaviour as well: which sources and landing pages led to sales, how a campaign performed, where people drop out of a funnel, what visitors searched for on your site, which pages people read to the end, and who’s on the site right now. The store questions work with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, FluentCart and Freemius.
On a free site, the server tells the assistant which questions need Pro, so it says so instead of guessing an answer from pageviews.
What the assistant can and can’t see
The assistant signs in as a WordPress user, with an application password you created for it, and sees exactly what that user can see in Vireo’s dashboard. If you’d rather it didn’t use an administrator account, give it a user whose role only has access to Vireo’s numbers, under Settings, General, “Roles with access”. Revoke the password on the user’s profile and the assistant is cut off.
Every tool is read-only. The assistant can ask for reports. It can’t change a setting, delete data or touch anything else on your site, and the endpoint only serves Vireo’s tools, not the rest of WordPress.
Your analytics stay in your WordPress database. Nothing is copied to RebelCode or to another analytics service. When the assistant needs a figure, it asks your site for that one report, and the answer goes to the AI tool you’re using, the same as if you’d pasted the report into a chat yourself. What it receives is the same totals and lists the dashboard shows. To count each visitor once a day, Vireo keeps a scrambled ID made with a secret that changes daily, and deletes it after two days. Pro also keeps hashed per-visitor records for its live view and its funnels. The assistant’s tools turn everything into totals and lists before it sees them, so no answer contains a row about one visitor.
Text that visitors control, such as page addresses, referrers and search terms, is flattened before it reaches the assistant. That makes it harder for a crafted address or referrer to pass itself off as an instruction.
If an answer looks wrong
The assistant reads the same numbers as your dashboard, over the same default range of the last 30 days in your site’s timezone. If an answer surprises you, open the same range on the Overview and compare. When they differ, the assistant has usually picked a different range or filter than you meant, and asking it which one it used sorts it out.