Amazon CloudFront in the Consent Gap Index

A delivery network, not a data collector

The index carries a category for CloudFront — CDN — and a classification: not tracking. That distinction matters more here than on most entries, because CloudFront's high site count is easy to misread. Appearing on 349 sites does not mean 349 sites hired Amazon to observe their visitors. It means 349 sites host files on AWS, or use a product that does. A CDN request carries the visitor's IP address and user agent to the delivery network because that is how a request works, not because anyone chose to send it. The interesting question about CloudFront is therefore not what it does, but what tends to accompany it.

What else is on the page

Google was present on 269 of the 349 CloudFront sites, 77.1 percent — the single most common companion in this entity's own co-presence figures. OneTrust follows on 86 sites (24.6 percent), jsDelivr on 76 (21.8), Cloudflare on 47 (13.5), Cloudflare Analytics on 40 (11.5), Meta on 37 (10.6), HubSpot on 33 (9.5) and Google Tag Manager on 32 (9.2). These are counts of sites where both appear, not a claim that one loaded the other. Read as a picture of a market rather than a chain of causation, it is a fair sketch of how a well-resourced site is assembled in practice: AWS underneath, Google measuring, a CDN or two for libraries, a consent vendor on top.

The median CloudFront page

9 distinct companies, 2 of them classified as trackers, across 59 requests to third-party hosts. Among the 88 companies in this index, that request count ranks 20th and the company count 43rd — a page that talks a lot to a mid-sized cast. First contact on the median site landed at 653 milliseconds, ranking 51st of 88; the fastest recorded on any CloudFront site was 91 milliseconds. Early contact happened on 326 of the 349 sites, 93.4 percent. The median site had 7 companies contacted before an answer could be registered, and none after the consent window closed.

Banners on just over half

182 of the 349 sites carried a consent tool. Six were seen alongside them: OneTrust on 96 sites, an IAB TCF consent tool on 45, Cookiebot on 13, Osano on 11, CookieYes on 7 and Usercentrics on 6. Those figures are counts of sightings rather than slices of the 182 — a site can carry more than one banner, and some carry none of the six by name. What the split shows plainly enough is that CloudFront's population is bimodal: roughly half of it is European-facing enough to need a dialog, and roughly half is not.

Twelve sites by name

discord.gg contacted 7 companies, all 7 early, at 325 ms; discord.com the same 7 of 7 at 524 ms. flickr.com shows 8 of 8 early at 457 ms behind an Osano banner, indeed.com 4 of 4 at 693 ms and duolingo.com 3 of 3 at 1,632 ms, both behind OneTrust. Heavier and more deferred: slack.com contacted 10 companies with 8 early at 806 ms; salesforce.com 9 companies but only 4 early, with first contact at 1,742 ms; ibm.com 9 with 5 early at 528 ms. eventbrite.com shows 8 with 6 early at 411 ms, media.net 8 of 8 at 745 ms, smartadserver.com 7 of 7 at 667 ms and opendns.com 6 with 5 early at 1,013 ms.

What to do with a CDN entry

If you are auditing a page and CloudFront shows up, the useful next step is not to remove it but to look at the other eight companies the median CloudFront page contacts. The delivery network is the least interesting name on that list and usually the easiest one to explain. The measurement method and the definition of the early window are at /consent-gap; if you want the same breakdown for a page in front of you rather than one of the 5,294 here, the MurmStack extension produces it live.

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 269 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 86 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 76 of these sites
• website-files.comTogether on 62 of these sites
• CloudflareTogether on 47 of these sites
• Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 40 of these sites
• MetaTogether on 37 of these sites
• HubSpotTogether on 33 of these sites