website-files.com: an asset host, and the shape it makes

Many requests, not many companies

The median site where this hostname appears made 65 requests during the measured load, which ranks 17th of the 88 companies in this index, towards the busy end. Yet the median count of separate companies reached is eight, ranking 48th, and the median count of hosts classified as tracking is one, ranking 67th. That gap is the signature of an asset host. Images, fonts, stylesheets and scripts all arrive from the same place, so the request counter climbs while the company counter does not.

It sits behind another network

Amazon CloudFront was present on 96.9 percent of these 64 sites, effectively always. Google follows on 75 percent, jsDelivr on 46.9 percent, OneTrust on 25 percent, Cloudflare on 23.4 percent, then a marketing form integration on 14.1 percent, a testing tool and HubSpot on 12.5 percent each, a translation widget on 10.9 percent and Adobe Fonts on 9.4 percent. Reading that list top to bottom describes the stack: a site builder's asset domain, fronted by a large CDN, on marketing sites that add a form, a test and a translator.

Almost every site has early contact

On 63 of the 64 sites, 98.4 percent, at least one company was contacted before a consent choice was possible; a single site had none. That share ranks sixth of 88 companies in this index. The median site had reached seven companies inside that window and the median count of companies first seen after it closes is zero. First contact came at a median of 528 milliseconds, with the quickest at 99 milliseconds. What the window measures is set out at /consent-gap; the count is per site and does not name which companies arrived.

In the named sites, early is usually everything

The individual results are strikingly uniform. discord.gg reached seven companies, all seven inside the window, at 325 milliseconds; discord.com seven, all early, at 524 milliseconds; discordapp.com seven, all early, at 392 milliseconds. flickr.com reached eight, all early, behind an Osano banner. gumgum.com reached eight, all early, at 200 milliseconds; media.net eight, all early; smartadserver.com seven; sharethrough.com six; agora.io seven; anthropic.com four, all early, at 261 milliseconds. Only two of the twelve break the pattern: moloco.com, ten companies with nine early, and split.io, fourteen with eleven early.

Half carry a detected consent tool

A recognisable consent tool was detected on 33 of the 64 sites, 51.6 percent. OneTrust was seen alongside sixteen of them, then Osano and an IAB TCF consent tool on four each, CookieYes on three, and Usercentrics and Termly on two each. Sites can carry more than one banner, so these are counts of what was seen alongside rather than a division of the 33. The mix leans to enterprise consent products, which fits a population of company marketing sites rather than publishers.

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.

• Amazon CloudFrontTogether on 62 of these sites
• GoogleTogether on 48 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 30 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 16 of these sites
• CloudflareTogether on 15 of these sites
• HubSpotTogether on 8 of these sites
• Adobe FontsTogether on 6 of these sites