We let an LLM read our session recordings — here is what changed

Session recording has worked well for a decade. Capturing what a visitor did — every scroll, click, and keystroke of it — is a solved problem, and several excellent tools will do it for you. The unsolved problem was always on the other side: who watches the recordings? Every team we know that adopted session replay went through the same arc — a week of fascination, a folder of bookmarked sessions, and then silence, because nobody has hours to watch strangers browse.

Recordings are documents

The insight that unlocked it for us is that a session recording is not really a video — it is a structured log of events that can be rendered as one. And a log can be turned into a transcript: “arrived on the pricing page from a search ad, scrolled to the comparison table, clicked the disabled button twice, opened the FAQ, left after ninety seconds.” Written down like that, a session becomes a document, and reading documents is the thing language models are unreasonably good at.

Cheap models matter more here than clever ones. A verdict on one session is an easy read; the hard part is doing it ten thousand times a day without the economics collapsing. Small, inexpensive models read a session transcript well enough to flag friction, spot the never-human sessions, and judge whether the click was worth its price — at a cost that rounds to nothing per session.

The interface becomes an email

Once every session gets read, the product question inverts. Nobody needs another dashboard on top of the analysis — they need the analysis to come to them. So the primary interface became a morning email: what yesterday’s paid clicks did, which campaigns leaked, which pages broke, with each claim linking to the recording behind it.

The replays are still there, and they matter — evidence beats assertion. But they changed role, from the thing you were supposed to spend your evening watching to the thing you pull up to confirm what the morning read already told you. That inversion, more than any single feature, is what AI changed about session analytics.