Google Analytics still runs most of the web, but privacy-first tools and warehouse-native tracking are taking new installs. What's changing in web analytics, and how to detect what a site runs.
Google Analytics, mostly through Tag Manager, is still on a large share of the web. The movement is at the edges: privacy-first tools like Plausible and Fathom are winning new installs, and bigger teams are moving to warehouse-native tracking they own outright. Cookie rules and data ownership are driving it, and you can watch the migration in a site's requests.
Analytics is the easiest part of a stack to read from the outside, because every tool has to call home. That makes it a clean window into a trend that is quietly reshaping how the web measures itself.
Google still owns the floor
In our index, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics together appear on more sites than any other analytics setup, and it is not close. GTM alone shows up on thousands of sites because it is the container almost everyone loads first. If you are detecting analytics, Google is the baseline you measure everything else against.
Where the growth is
The interesting installs are not the giants. They are the lightweight, privacy-first tools that skip cookies and banners. Three forces push teams toward them:
- Cookie and consent rules that make heavy, cross-site tracking a liability.
- Performance: a 2 KB script beats a tag manager loading ten more.
- Ownership: teams increasingly want their data in their own warehouse, not a vendor's dashboard.
| Tool | Type | The pitch | How to spot it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics | Full, free, cookie-based | The default, deep integration | Loads via Google Tag Manager |
| Plausible / Fathom | Privacy-first, lightweight | No cookies, no banner, tiny script | A single small first-party script |
| Warehouse-native | First-party, owned pipeline | Your data, your warehouse | Events posting to a first-party endpoint |
Why it shows up in the request graph
Every analytics tool has a tell. Classic setups call googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com. Privacy-first tools load one small script from their own domain and post events back to it. Warehouse-native setups send events to a first-party collector. Read the hostnames a page talks to and you can usually name the analytics stack without opening a single dashboard. The browser network tab, covered in our detection guide, is where this is most visible.
See the analytics stack on any site.
Look up a domainFAQ
Is Google Analytics still the most used analytics tool?
Yes. Google Analytics, usually loaded through Google Tag Manager, is still on a larger share of sites than any other analytics tool. The growth, though, is in lighter privacy-first and warehouse-native options.
What are privacy-first analytics tools?
Tools like Plausible and Fathom that measure traffic without cookies or cross-site tracking, using a tiny first-party script. They avoid consent banners and load faster, which is why new installs increasingly choose them.
How can I tell which analytics a website uses?
Watch the page's network requests. Calls to googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com mean a Google setup; a single small script from one domain usually means a privacy-first tool. A detection tool resolves these to named products for you.
