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SmartPredict Navigation

5 min read

SmartPredict watches how visitors move through your site, works out which page each visitor is likely to open next, and tells the browser to prefetch it ahead of time. When the visitor clicks, the page is already on its way.

What this does

SmartPredict records each page-to-page transition as an anonymous pair: the page a visitor came from and the page they went to. It builds these into a map of likely next pages for every starting page.

From that map it emits a Speculation Rules tag into your page’s <head>. This is a browser feature (Chrome’s Speculation Rules API) that lets the browser prefetch the pages a visitor is most likely to open next, so they load faster on click.

The predictions are statistical, not guessed. SmartPredict counts how often each transition happens and ranks the most common next pages. AI is used only to write a short, plain-English summary of the patterns for the dashboard. The predictions themselves do not use AI.

Why use it

When the browser prefetches the next likely page in advance, that page loads noticeably faster when the visitor clicks. SmartPredict aims that prefetching at the pages your real visitors actually go to next, based on observed behavior rather than guesses.

Requirements

  • xSpeed Cache Pro must be active.
  • SmartPredict is off by default. You enable it in its settings.
  • Prefetching uses the browser’s Speculation Rules API, which is supported in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. Browsers without support simply ignore the tag.
  • Data collection respects your AI Privacy settings. If consent is required, only visitors who have accepted the consent banner are recorded.

How it works

  1. A small tracker script loads on your frontend pages. When a visitor leaves a page, it sends one ping with the from/to page pair using navigator.sendBeacon (falling back to fetch).
  2. The server appends that transition to a buffer.
  3. On a schedule (an hourly background task) or when you trigger it manually, SmartPredict analyzes the buffer. It counts transitions and, for each starting page, keeps the most common next pages.
  4. For a page to become a prediction, that transition must have been seen at least a few times, so one-off clicks do not create noise.
  5. On each frontend page, SmartPredict looks up the predictions for the current URL and emits a Speculation Rules tag listing the likely next pages to prefetch.

Note: Predictions only appear after enough traffic has been observed. A brand-new site or a freshly cleared buffer has nothing to predict yet.

How to enable it

  1. Open the xSpeed Cache Pro dashboard and go to the SmartPredict panel.
  2. Turn on Enable SmartPredict.
  3. Adjust Minimum confidence (%) and Max prefetches per page if needed (the defaults are a good starting point).
  4. Let your site receive normal traffic. Predictions build over time as transitions are recorded.

Settings explained

SettingWhat it doesDefault
Enable SmartPredictTurns the feature on. Records navigation patterns and emits Speculation Rules.Off
Minimum confidence (%)Only prefetch a candidate page when it accounts for at least this share of the moves away from the current page.30
Max prefetches per pageThe most pages SmartPredict will prefetch from any single page.5

Enable SmartPredict. The master switch. While off, no navigation is recorded and no Speculation Rules are emitted.

Minimum confidence (%). Confidence is how dominant a next page is among all the moves away from the current page. A higher value means fewer but more confident prefetches. The range is 0 to 100.

Max prefetches per page. Caps how many pages can be prefetched from one page. The range is 1 to 10. Prefetching costs bandwidth, so 3 to 5 is a sensible range, especially for visitors on slow connections.

Best practices

  • Keep Max prefetches per page modest (around 3 to 5) so you do not waste bandwidth on visitors who are on slow or metered connections.
  • Raise Minimum confidence (%) if you only want to prefetch very predictable next steps.
  • Give it time. Predictions need repeated transitions before they appear, so expect them to build up as traffic flows.

Troubleshooting

No Speculation Rules tag appears in my page source. SmartPredict only emits the tag when it has predictions for the current URL. If the buffer is new or the page has not been visited enough, there is nothing to emit yet. The tag has the id xspeed-smart-predict.

Nothing is being recorded. Check your AI Privacy settings. If consent is required and the xspeed_ai_consent cookie is missing, the visitor is not recorded. The tracker also skips when the from and to pages are the same.

Prefetching does not seem to happen. Speculation Rules prefetching requires a supported browser. Browsers that do not support the API ignore the tag, which is harmless.

I want to start fresh. Clearing SmartPredict data wipes the recorded buffer, the computed predictions, and the saved summary.

FAQ

Does SmartPredict use AI to predict pages? No. Predictions are based on counting real transitions. AI is used only to write the plain-English summary of the patterns shown in the dashboard, and that summary is optional.

Is visitor identity recorded? No. SmartPredict records page-to-page transitions, not who made them. URLs are normalized (query strings and fragments are dropped) before being stored.

How often are predictions recalculated? Automatically once an hour in the background, and you can trigger a recalculation manually.

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