Or must they have clicked the button on listing to ever be tracked as a daily/weekly user vs. they installed via link to the .xpi
Add-on usage statistics are gathered from Firefox’s telemetry data. As a result the active user count shown on AMO will update regardless of what link the user followed to install the add-on.
Thanks for the answer, check this link out: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/manage/monitoring-extension-usage-statistics/
The statistics dashboard will only count installs from the AMO listing page. Installs from other sources, such as .xpi downloads from a website or blog, are not counted on the dashboard, even if they link to an XPI hosted on AMO.
So to confirm, if I link to .xpi and users install, it will not count as a download on the dashboard, but will count as a daily user if he uses it every day (so the stats can look warped like I have more users than installs)
That sounds right to me 