Last updated November 13, 2026
The Caddie Chat is a personal site written and run by Joe Stoehner. The stories, course pages and photo rolls have no comments, no newsletter sign-up and no ads. The one thing the site does collect is ordinary visit statistics, explained below.
Site statistics (Google Analytics)
The site uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits. It records which pages are read, roughly where readers are (country and city, worked out from the IP address, which Google Analytics does not store), what kind of device and browser was used, and which site or search sent the reader here. That includes whether a visit came from an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot.
To tell one visit from another, Google Analytics sets first-party cookies named
_ga and _ga_6RST62EFLX, which last up to two years. If
you arrive from an AI assistant, the site also keeps a small note in your
browser's session storage, cleared when you close the tab, so that visit is
counted once.
The statistics are used for one thing: to see what people read. They are not used for advertising, they are not sold, and the advertising features of Google Analytics are switched off. Visit-level data is kept for up to 14 months.
Google processes this data on the site's behalf. Google's own explanation is at How Google uses information from sites that use its services.
Readers in Europe and the UK
If you are reading from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, the analytics cookies above are not set. Google Analytics receives a cookieless page count only, which cannot be tied to you from one page to the next.
How to opt out
- Install Google's Analytics opt-out add-on for your browser.
- Block or clear cookies for thecaddiechat.com in your browser settings.
- Use a content blocker. The site works the same without analytics.
Hosting
The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. Like any web host, GitHub receives your IP address when your browser requests a page and may keep it in server logs for security. See GitHub's privacy statement. Fonts and images are served from this site, not from third parties.
Links to other sites
Links to Instagram and other sites take you off The Caddie Chat. What those sites collect is covered by their own policies.
Questions
Message @thecaddiechat on Instagram. If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.