Guide
How to see who opened your link or document
Updated 30 October 2026
A plain link can’t tell you who opened it. A click tracker counts clicks and guesses the device and the city, but everyone who has the link adds to the same count. To see people, the page has to know who the reader is, so the reader has to sign in. On ashare.net, private and company documents show you each signed-in reader with how many times and when they opened it; public documents are only counted.
What a link tracker can tell you
A short link or a tracking link sends the reader through a server that records each click before it redirects. What it can record is what any web server sees: the time, a rough location from the IP address, the browser and device, the page the click came from. It has no name to record. A forwarded link looks the same as the original, and three people behind one office network can look like one.
The usual workaround is one link per recipient. A click on Marta’s link was probably Marta, until she forwards it. That is fine for a newsletter. It is a guess for a document where you need to know who read the numbers before the meeting.
Google Docs
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides list viewers in the Activity dashboard, with conditions. It works only for files owned by a work or school account, and you need edit access and an account in the same domain as the file’s owner. Whether a reader shows up depends on their organization’s settings and their own: anyone can turn off their view history. See Google’s help.
See who opened a document on ashare.net
Readers of a private or company document sign in before they see it, so ashare.net knows who each one is.
- Publish the document. A new one is private: only you open it.
- Share it with specific people by email, up to 100 per document, or with your company. Each reader signs in with a 6-digit code from their email; there is no account to create.
- Look at the views: on the document page, by asking your agent “who opened the report?”, which calls
viewsover MCP, or from the terminal.
$ npx ashare-cli views <id>For each reader you get the email, how many times they opened it, and the first and last time. Your own visits are not counted. Scripts read the same list from GET /api/artifacts/<id>/views; see the REST API.
| Visibility | Who gets in | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Private | You and the emails you added | Each reader: email, how many times, first and last time |
| Company | Everyone who signs in with an email on your company’s domain, and the emails you added | Each reader: email, how many times, first and last time |
| Public | Anyone with the link, or with the link and a password | The number of views, no names |
Readers know you see it
Readers of a private or company document see a line on the page: “The owner sees that you opened this document.” Nobody is tracked without being told. Public documents record nobody; each visit only adds to the count.
People who tried to get in
Views show who got in. Access requests show who tried. Someone not on the list who opens the link and confirms their email sees “You don’t have access” and can ask you in with a short message. You get the request by email, with their address, and approve or deny it from the letter, from My documents or through your agent. A forwarded link turns into a request you decide on, not an anonymous click.
When a link tracker is the better tool
For a public page with many readers you don’t know, like a landing page, a post or a campaign, a click tracker or web analytics is the right tool. Asking strangers to sign in would cost you most of them. Signed-in views fit a document you send to particular people: a report for a client, a spec for your team, research for the people who asked for it. See Who opened it in the docs.
ashare.net: your agent publishes HTML or Markdown and you choose who opens it: your company, specific emails or a password. Readers comment, the agent fixes the document.
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