adtrafficquality.google: the pages it sits on keep loading after the window closes

Two more companies arrive after the window has closed

The median site carrying this hostname contacted 9 companies in total, 5 of them before a consent banner could realistically have been answered, and a median of 2 more after that window had closed. That last figure is measured per site and then taken as a median in its own right, not derived by subtracting one median from another.

A non-zero figure there is less common than it sounds in this corpus, and it describes a page that is still recruiting participants after the point where a visitor could have made a choice. For a hostname whose job title is verifying advertising traffic, a load that continues past the banner is what you would expect: there is nothing to verify until the auction has run.

751 ms to first contact — 28th slowest of 88

The median first contact on these pages landed at 751 ms, which ranks 28th of the 88 companies in this index where rank 1 is the slowest. The fastest single site in the group reached out at 75 ms.

The share of sites with early contact is 91.9% — 137 of 149 — which ranks 60th of 88 with rank 1 the highest. So relative to this corpus, these are pages that start late and, proportionally, are somewhat less likely to have anything arrive in the opening window at all. Twelve of the 149 sites had no early contact whatsoever. Set against the median of 2 companies arriving after the window, the picture is a page whose third-party activity is weighted later than most.

Google on 88% of them, and an ad stack underneath

Google was present on 131 of the 149 sites (87.9%), the strongest co-presence in this entity's list by a wide distance. Then Criteo on 29 (19.5%), jsDelivr on 27 (18.1%), Amazon Ads on 24 (16.1%), Cloudflare Analytics on 21 (14.1%), Cloudflare on 19 (12.8%), Comscore on 18 (12.1%), adnxs.com on 17 (11.4%), crwdcntrl.net on 16 (10.7%) and the Meta Pixel on 13 (8.7%).

After Google, that list is an advertising auction: a retargeter, an exchange, a data platform, an audience measurement firm. This hostname does not appear on general-purpose pages. It appears where inventory is being sold, which is consistent both with the name and with the median page here contacting 9 companies and running 51 requests — rank 30 of 88 on request volume.

Banners on 40% of these sites, mostly the advertising framework

Consent software was detected on 60 of the 149 sites. The tool seen alongside most often was an IAB TCF framework banner, on 38 sites, with OneTrust on 16, CookieYes on 3, Cookiebot on 2 and Termly on 1. Because one page can show two banners, those five counts are sightings and do not divide the 60 between them.

TCF's lead is the same signal as the co-presence list read a second way. It is the advertising industry's own framework, encoding a visitor's choices into a string that bidders read before they bid, and its concentration here marks these as pages built to sell impressions.

News, retail, and a wide spread of load

elmundo.es is the heaviest of the named sites at 38 companies with 34 of them inside the window, first contact at 683 ms behind a TCF banner. indiatimes.com: 30 companies with 20 inside, at 969 ms. lowes.com reached 25 with only 7 inside, at 962 ms. target.com: 15 with 9, at 1,180 ms. olx.pl: 14 with 6, at 1,152 ms behind OneTrust. itmedia.co.jp: 14 with 3, at 1,272 ms. kick.com: 10 with 3, at 1,483 ms. daum.net: 9 with 3, at 1,537 ms.

The light end looks different. bmj.com, a medical journal, contacted 10 companies with all 10 inside the window at 356 ms behind OneTrust. harvard.edu reached 5, all 5 inside, at 272 ms with no banner detected. booking.com: 5 with 3 inside at 1,071 ms. ntp.org, a time-synchronisation service, contacted 4 companies with none inside the window and first contact at 2,085 ms.

Across those twelve sites the number of companies ranges from 4 to 38 and the first contact from 272 ms to 2,085 ms. A hostname that appears on that spread is riding on something the pages share — an ad stack — rather than on any property of the sites themselves. The window these timings are measured against is defined at /consent-gap, and MurmStack shows the same list for a page you are on.

Seen on the same pages

Companies most often contacted by the same sites. Co-presence only — the crawl records what arrived, not who called whom.

• GoogleTogether on 131 of these sites
• CriteoTogether on 29 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 27 of these sites
• Amazon AdsTogether on 24 of these sites
• Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 21 of these sites
• CloudflareTogether on 19 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 18 of these sites
• adnxs.comTogether on 17 of these sites