Why this exists
webtracking.org is built by people working in digital and web analytics who wanted to understand the real state of the industry — and to put open knowledge and useful utilities in front of everyone else doing the same work.
Most of what gets published about tracking is either vendor marketing or a survey of what people say they run. We wanted the other thing: what actually loads on real pages, who owns it, what it sets, and how it behaves — plus the reference material and tools we kept rebuilding privately on every engagement. All of it free, all of it checkable.
How we work
Where a number appears, it comes from data we can hand you. The State of Web Tracking is computed from the public HTTP Archive crawl, every percentage shows the two counts it divides, and the queries, definitions, and limits are all on the methodology page.
The standards are versioned and citable, the tools run entirely in your browser, and the scorecard methodology is published before the grades are. If you can’t check our work, it isn’t finished.
The people who implement tracking understand it best — which makes them the right people to audit it. We write the implementation reference and the tracking-prevention guides, and we grade the vendors either way.
Entries cite primary sources so they can be disputed. Substantiated corrections get applied, dated, and noted publicly — at the same volume as the original claim.
What’s here
- The State of Web Tracking — the data report: adoption, analytics market share, the entities behind third-party requests, the cookie census, page burden, and which trackers travel together, measured from 15.7M root pages. Its methodology, fingerprint library, and entity map are published alongside it.
- The reference and the standards — how tracking actually works, per platform, plus open versioned specs for the things every team reinvents badly.
- Free tools — thirteen of them, all running entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste leaves the page.
- The Privacy Scorecard and the tracking-prevention guides — the other side of the same expertise.
- The Tracking Wire — the weekly briefing, plus each data drop as it lands.
- Compliance Atlas ↗ — our sister project: every data-protection law on Earth, plotted, comparable, and applied to your stack.
How it stays free
Sponsorship, affiliate links where we would have recommended the tool anyway, and paid products built on the same engines as the free tools. The rules are public on the sponsor page: placements are labelled, and grades, rankings, and report findings are never for sale. We also run privacy-first, server-side analytics on this site — dogfooding the thesis rather than contradicting it.
Corrections to a guide, a dataset entry, or a number in the report are the fastest way to make this better — and they get applied and dated publicly.