Optimizely

Sixty-seven of sixty-nine

On 67 of the 69 sites, at least one company was contacted before the banner window closed. That is 97.1 percent, and it ranks 15th of the 88 companies in this index. Median first contact came at 596 milliseconds, 63rd of 88, so outside activity tends to begin earlier on these pages than on most sets measured here. The quickest recorded across the group was 146 milliseconds, and bbc.co.uk matches that figure exactly. Split testing works by choosing a variant before the page paints, which is why these scripts are conventionally placed high in the document — but that is a fact about how the technique works, not something this crawl measured. What the crawl records is how many companies a site contacted before the window closed, not which ones.

Half of them run OneTrust

45 of the 69 sites carried a recognisable consent tool, and OneTrust was seen on 35 of them: half of the entire set, not just half of those with a banner. The IAB TCF signal appeared on 7, and Iubenda, Cookiebot and Osano on 1 each. Those are sighting counts rather than slices, since one site can run more than one layer. A single consent vendor covering half a set says something about who the customers are. OneTrust sells into organisations large enough to have a compliance function, and the site list matches: broadcasters, a hospital system, developer-tool companies and a workplace messaging platform.

Unremarkable weight

The median Optimizely site contacted 7 companies, 60th of 88; made 41 third-party requests, 50th of 88; and carried 2 trackers, 44th of 88. Median companies contacted before the window closed was 6, 37th of 88 and level with 19 others, and at the median no company is contacted after it. Nothing here is extreme in either direction. The profile is a mainstream commercial site with a moderate stack, not a publisher carrying an ad exchange, and that is worth stating because a tool classified as tracking does not necessarily sit on heavy pages.

An engineering signature in the co-presence list

Google was on 44 of the 69 sites, 63.8 percent, and OneTrust on 35, 50.7. Then Google Tag Manager and unpkg on 11 each, 15.9 percent; jsDelivr, Sentry and Cloudflare Analytics on 9 each, 13; Microsoft Ads on 8, 11.6; Amazon CloudFront and tiqcdn.com on 7 each, 10.1. Sentry and unpkg appearing in the same band is a tell: error monitoring and a package delivery network are the marks of a site maintained by an engineering team with a build process, rather than one assembled in a page builder. That fits a product whose whole premise is shipping variants of a page deliberately.

The sixty-nine

bbc.com and bbc.co.uk both registered 6 companies with all 6 inside the window, and bbc.co.uk began earliest of the examples at 146 milliseconds. cnn.com registered 17 with 14 inside and fortune.com 15 with 14. typeform.com and klaviyo.com registered 14 each, clevelandclinic.org 11, slack.com 10, change.org 8 with 4 inside, gofundme.com and bit.ly 7 apiece, jetbrains.com 5. change.org was the latest of the examples to begin, at 1,045 milliseconds. Nonprofits and a hospital system sit in the same set as newsrooms and software companies, which is what an experimentation tool with a broad customer base looks like from the outside.

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 44 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 35 of these sites
• Google Tag ManagerTogether on 11 of these sites
• unpkgTogether on 11 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 9 of these sites
• SentryTogether on 9 of these sites
• Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 9 of these sites
• Microsoft AdsTogether on 8 of these sites