Hotjar on 118 sites: an average page, in average company
Hotjar is session replay and heatmaps. It records how visitors move, scroll, click and give up on a page, plays those recordings back for the site's own team, and stacks thousands of them into a heat map showing where attention went. Product and design teams install it to find out why a page is not working. This index found it on 118 of the 5,294 sites measured, the 35th-widest reach of the 88 companies broken out here. Its own numbers are ordinary in almost every direction — which makes the company it keeps, and the banner situation on those sites, the parts worth reading.
Every median lands in the middle of the index
The median site carrying Hotjar contacted 10 companies over 54 requests, 3 of them classified as tracking, with a median first third-party contact at 686 ms and 6 companies arriving inside the pre-consent window. The fastest first contact recorded in the group was 75 ms.
Against the 88 companies in this index those figures rank 36th, 27th, 37th, 38th and 39th. Five separate measures, all of them within a few places of the middle. That is unusual in itself: most entities here are extreme on something. A page carrying Hotjar is, by this corpus's standards, a completely typical instrumented page.
Google on 114 of the 118
Google was present on 96.6% of Hotjar's sites. Then LinkedIn on 26 (22%), jsDelivr on 23 (19.5%), Meta on 23 (19.5%), Amazon CloudFront on 22 (18.6%), the Meta Pixel on 20 (16.9%), amazonaws.com on 18 (15.3%), Cloudflare on 15 (12.7%), hs-banner.com on 14 (11.9%) and hs-analytics.net on 13 (11%).
The last two are HubSpot hostnames, and with LinkedIn near the top the shape of the list is recognisable: this is a business-to-business marketing stack. Ads on a professional network, a CRM watching form fills, a delivery network for the scripts, and session replay to see why the demo form is not being submitted. Hotjar is the diagnostic tool at the end of that chain rather than the reason any of it is there.
Two-thirds of these sites had no banner to answer
Consent software was detected on 40 of the 118. The IAB TCF framework was seen alongside on 17 of them, OneTrust on 15, CookieYes on 3, Usercentrics on 2, Cookiebot on 2 and Iubenda on 1 — sightings, not slices, since a site can carry more than one.
That leaves 78 sites with no consent interface the crawl could find. It is the single most important number for reading the next section, because on most of these pages there was never a question on screen in the first place.
105 sites where something arrived early
On 105 of the 118, at least one company was contacted before a banner could have been answered — 89%, ranking 70th of the 88 companies here. On the median site, 6 companies arrived in that window and 2 more appeared after it closed.
The corpus counts per site and does not name the arrivals, so it cannot say whether Hotjar itself was among the early ones on any given page. What it can say is that Hotjar was present, and that on nine sites in ten the gap was too. For a product whose job is recording what a visitor does, where the recording starts relative to that window is the question people usually want answered, and this measurement is deliberately not the thing that answers it.
The named sites
tailscale.com contacted 11 companies, all 11 inside the window, first contact at 407 ms, no banner detected. rackspace.com: 14 with 12. bidmachine.io: 22 with 13, the heaviest of the twelve. marca.com: 17 with 12, behind an IAB TCF banner. psu.edu: 5 and 5. jusbrasil.com.br: 7 with 6. pexels.com: 6 and 6 at 293 ms, behind OneTrust. spankbang.com: 13 with 7 at 267 ms.
The slower ones look different. fwmrm.net contacted 14 companies with 5 inside the window at 1,088 ms behind OneTrust; mediafire.com 6 with 3 at 1,173 ms; superhosting.bg 6 with 3 behind an Iubenda banner. mercadolivre.com.br is the only example with nothing at all in the window: 3 companies, first contact at 2,261 ms.
A university, a Brazilian legal database, a stock photo library, a VPN vendor, an ad exchange and a tube site. Session replay is not a category of website; it is a tool that any of them can buy.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| mercadolivre.com.br | 3 | 0 | 2261 ms |
| mediafire.com | 6 | 3 | 1173 ms |
| pexels.com | 6 | 6 | 293 ms |
| fwmrm.net | 14 | 5 | 1088 ms |
| tailscale.com | 11 | 11 | 407 ms |
| bidmachine.io | 22 | 13 | 715 ms |
| marca.com | 17 | 12 | 590 ms |
| psu.edu | 5 | 5 | 962 ms |
| spankbang.com | 13 | 7 | 267 ms |
| rackspace.com | 14 | 12 | 597 ms |
| jusbrasil.com.br | 7 | 6 | 922 ms |
| superhosting.bg | 6 | 3 | 752 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| IAB TCF consent tool | 17 |
| OneTrust | 15 |
| CookieYes | 3 |
| Usercentrics | 2 |
| Cookiebot | 2 |
| Iubenda | 1 |
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 114 of these sites
- LinkedInTogether on 26 of these sites
- jsDelivrTogether on 23 of these sites
- MetaTogether on 23 of these sites
- Amazon CloudFrontTogether on 22 of these sites
- Meta PixelTogether on 20 of these sites
- amazonaws.comTogether on 18 of these sites
- CloudflareTogether on 15 of these sites
Questions
What does Hotjar record?
It captures interaction with the page — pointer movement, scrolling, clicks, form behaviour — and reconstructs it as a replayable session for the site's own team, plus aggregate heatmaps. This index classifies it under session replay and heatmaps.
Did Hotjar start recording before consent?
This corpus cannot tell you. Early contact is a per-site count of companies arriving in the window, with no names attached, so the supportable statement is that Hotjar was present on 105 sites where such contact happened.
Why did only 40 of 118 sites show a consent banner?
Because a banner is a choice the site makes, usually driven by where its visitors are. The other 78 presented nothing the crawl could detect on a single cold load from one location.
Is a page carrying Hotjar heavier than average?
Not by these ranks. Ten companies and 54 requests on the median site place it 36th and 27th of the 88 companies in this index — squarely mid-table on both.