Font Awesome, measured on 127 sites
Font Awesome is an icon set. A site includes its stylesheet or font file and gets several thousand ready-made symbols: the magnifying glass, the hamburger menu, the little envelope beside a contact link. Nobody installs it to learn anything about visitors, and this index classifies it as not tracking. The sites that use it look the part. The median one carries 1 tracker-classified company, which ranks 80th of the 88 companies profiled here. It is still a connection to somebody else's server, made before a visitor has clicked anything, and it was present on 127 of the 5,294 sites measured.
A dependency, not a measurement tool
Font Awesome is catalogued here under icons and marked as not tracking, and the numbers behind its sites are consistent with that. The median site using it carries 1 tracker-classified company, 80th of 88, and issues 39 requests, 55th of 88. Its median company count is 8, 50th of 88. That is a group sitting below the middle of this index on tracker density and squarely in the middle on page weight, which is roughly what you would predict for a decorative dependency that gets added to whatever the site already was.
Early contact on 111 of 127 sites
At least one company was contacted before the banner could be answered on 111 of the 127 sites, a share of 87.4% that ranks 78th of the 88 companies here, towards the lower end. The median count in that window is 6, ranking 37th of 88 and level with 19 others, and the median after the window closes is 1. Three of the twelve examples recorded nothing at all in the early window and all three were slow to reach outside: casalemedia.com contacted 5 companies with first contact at 2,373 ms, maricopa.gov 9 companies at 3,205 ms, and abovedomains.com 11 companies at 9,610 ms, the slowest first contact of any site shown on this page.
Where an icon set ends up
The examples have almost nothing in common with each other, which is the point. who.int at global rank 252 is a United Nations agency; casalemedia.com is an ad exchange; tapad.com is an identity vendor; foxnews.com is a broadcaster; skyhigh.cloud is enterprise security; readthedocs.io hosts documentation; abovedomains.com and hanime1.me sit at opposite ends of the long tail; cam.ac.uk, umn.edu and dkttc.ac.th are universities in three countries; maricopa.gov is a US county government. Icon sets do not select for an industry, a budget or a regulatory regime, and the group's global ranks stretch from 252 to 1,542.
What else these pages load
Google is present on 93 of the 127 sites, 73.2%. After that come Cloudflare on 37, jsDelivr on 29, Adobe Fonts on 23, OneTrust on 21, Cloudflare Analytics on 13, Microsoft Clarity and addtoany.com on 12 each, and Google Tag Manager and Meta on 11 each. Two of the four most frequent companions, jsDelivr and Adobe Fonts, are asset hosts like Font Awesome itself. A page that fetches its icons from someone else's servers tends to fetch its fonts and its libraries the same way, and each of those is a separate connection opening before anything is rendered.
Banners on 46 of the 127
A recognised consent tool was found on 46 sites, leaving 81 without one. OneTrust was seen on 22, IAB TCF conformant tools on 10, Osano on 4, CookieYes on 4, Cookiebot on 3 and Usercentrics on 2, each counted alongside the others rather than as a share of the 46. Ten of the twelve examples carried no recognised banner at all. Median first contact for the group is 731 ms, 33rd of 88, and the quickest single first contact recorded was 144 ms.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| who.int | 8 | 8 | 340 ms |
| casalemedia.com | 5 | 0 | 2373 ms |
| skyhigh.cloud | 14 | 10 | 1005 ms |
| foxnews.com | 17 | 15 | 358 ms |
| dkttc.ac.th | 2 | 1 | 1957 ms |
| readthedocs.io | 4 | 4 | 563 ms |
| abovedomains.com | 11 | 0 | 9610 ms |
| cam.ac.uk | 4 | 4 | 316 ms |
| tapad.com | 11 | 11 | 226 ms |
| umn.edu | 11 | 9 | 1028 ms |
| hanime1.me | 9 | 9 | 633 ms |
| maricopa.gov | 9 | 0 | 3205 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| OneTrust | 22 |
| IAB TCF consent tool | 10 |
| Osano | 4 |
| CookieYes | 4 |
| Cookiebot | 3 |
| Usercentrics | 2 |
The six most common are listed. The remaining 1 of 46 sites with a banner carry something outside that six. One tool is recorded per site, so these counts never overlap.
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 93 of these sites
- CloudflareTogether on 37 of these sites
- jsDelivrTogether on 29 of these sites
- Adobe FontsTogether on 23 of these sites
- OneTrustTogether on 21 of these sites
- Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 13 of these sites
- Microsoft ClarityTogether on 12 of these sites
- Google Tag ManagerTogether on 11 of these sites
Questions
Does Font Awesome collect data about visitors?
This index classifies it as not tracking and records only that a request to it was made. What it does record is the context around that request: the median site using it contacts 8 companies over a page load, of which 1 is classified as tracking, across 39 requests.
Why does an icon set count as a third-party connection at all?
Because the browser fetches the file from a host other than the site's own domain, which means a request goes to a server the site does not run, carrying at minimum an IP address and a referrer, before the visitor has done anything on the page.
Can a site use the icons without the outside request?
Yes, by serving the files from its own domain instead of a shared host. This index does not distinguish self-hosted copies from CDN copies; it records the 127 sites where a request to Font Awesome's own host was observed.
Which of these sites was slowest to reach outside?
abovedomains.com, at 9,610 ms, against a group median of 731 ms. It contacted 11 companies over the page load and none of them fell inside the early window.