Meta Pixel, measured on 291 sites
The Meta Pixel is a short script a site adds so that Facebook and Instagram advertising can connect what happens after an ad click, a page view, a sign-up, a purchase, back to the campaign that produced it. It is the ninth most encountered company in this index, present on 291 of the 5,294 sites measured, 5.5% of them. The most consistent fact about those sites turns out not to be the pixel itself. It is that 276 of the 291 also contacted a Google host.
Google on 94.8% of Meta Pixel sites
Google appears alongside the Meta Pixel on 276 of its 291 sites. The next most frequent companion, LinkedIn, is on 55, or 18.9%, followed by jsDelivr on 45, Microsoft Clarity on 42, Cloudflare and Cloudflare Analytics on 38 each, OneTrust on 34, Amazon CloudFront on 29, amazonaws.com on 28 and Microsoft Ads on 27. The shape of that list matters as much as the top entry. There is one near-universal companion and then a long drop: the second-placed name appears on fewer than one site in five. A page carrying a Meta Pixel is, in this sample, almost always a page carrying Google measurement too, and the rest of its stack is close to a free choice.
One of the lowest early-contact shares in the index
On 244 of the 291 sites, at least one company was contacted before the banner could be answered. That is 83.8%, which ranks 85th of the 88 companies profiled here: only three groups record a smaller share. Put the other way, 47 of its sites showed no company at all inside that window. The examples include several of them. aliyun.com contacted 12 companies with none early and a first outside request at 3,876 ms; nikkei.com contacted 3 with none early at 3,374 ms; mlb.com 13 with 1; kick.com 10 with 3. The opposite pattern is just as present: datadoghq.com 22 of 24, applovin.com 16 of 18, cursor.sh 11 of 11, academia.edu, fiverr.com and playstation.com 7 of 7 each, pixabay.com 5 of 5.
The IAB TCF banner is its most common companion
A recognised consent tool was present on 117 of the 291 sites. IAB TCF conformant tools were seen on 66 of them, OneTrust on 43, and CookieYes, Cookiebot, Osano and Iubenda in single figures at 3, 2, 2 and 1. These are counts of sites where each was seen alongside the others, not a partition of the 117. TCF is the consent framework built for programmatic advertising, and its lead here fits a population assembled around ad measurement rather than around general site analytics.
The shape of the median page
The median Meta Pixel site contacts 11 companies over a page load and carries 3 classified as tracking, ranking 33rd and 31st of the 88 companies here. It issues 56 requests on the median page, 24th of 88. Median first contact is 817 ms, which ranks 16th of 88, so these pages are comparatively slow to reach outside their own domain. The quickest single first contact in the group was 90 ms. The median count of companies before the banner could be answered is 6, and the median count after the window closes is 2.
The range behind those medians
The twelve examples run from applovin.com at global rank 165 to academia.edu at 819, and from nikkei.com's 3 companies to datadoghq.com's 24. Between them sit an ad network, two cloud platforms, a stock image library, a console maker, an experimentation vendor, a streaming site, a code editor, a baseball league, a newspaper, a freelance marketplace and an academic network. There is no single kind of site here, which is what you would expect of a script whose only requirement is that somebody is buying advertising. MurmStack reports these same fields for any URL you point it at.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| applovin.com | 18 | 16 | 661 ms |
| datadoghq.com | 24 | 22 | 535 ms |
| aliyun.com | 12 | 0 | 3876 ms |
| pixabay.com | 5 | 5 | 235 ms |
| playstation.com | 7 | 7 | 851 ms |
| optimizely.com | 6 | 5 | 963 ms |
| kick.com | 10 | 3 | 1483 ms |
| cursor.sh | 11 | 11 | 834 ms |
| mlb.com | 13 | 1 | 1437 ms |
| nikkei.com | 3 | 0 | 3374 ms |
| fiverr.com | 7 | 7 | 861 ms |
| academia.edu | 7 | 7 | 584 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| IAB TCF consent tool | 66 |
| OneTrust | 43 |
| CookieYes | 3 |
| Cookiebot | 2 |
| Osano | 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 276 of these sites
- LinkedInTogether on 55 of these sites
- jsDelivrTogether on 45 of these sites
- Microsoft ClarityTogether on 42 of these sites
- CloudflareTogether on 38 of these sites
- Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 38 of these sites
- OneTrustTogether on 34 of these sites
- Amazon CloudFrontTogether on 29 of these sites
Questions
What is the Meta Pixel for?
Attribution and audience building for Facebook and Instagram advertising. The script reports page views and defined events back to Meta so a campaign can be credited with what happened after the click. In this index it was found on 291 of 5,294 sites, making it the ninth most encountered company here.
Does the pixel run before a visitor answers the banner?
This index cannot say. It counts, per site, how many separate companies were contacted before the banner could be answered, a median of 6 on Meta Pixel sites, without recording which companies those were. The method is described at /consent-gap.
Why does Google appear on nearly every Meta Pixel site?
The crawl records co-presence, not cause: on 276 of 291 sites both were contacted during the same page load. It does not record whether that reflects one tag manager deploying both, two separate decisions, or a template that ships with both.
How many of the Meta Pixel sites showed a consent banner?
117 of the 291, leaving 174 where the crawl recognised none. Where a banner was present, IAB TCF conformant tools were the most frequently seen, on 66 sites, with OneTrust next on 43.