Cookie banners in 2026: almost everyone has one, but data leaves early

In March we wrote about a hundred websites. Our leaderboard now covers more than five hundred sites from five markets, enough to compare countries properly. We took the 558 sites where we managed to measure something. Where the scanner found no banner, we opened it again in a browser and went through the screenshots.

Almost everyone has a banner

All 118 Czech sites show a cookie banner; in Slovakia, Germany and Austria it is 94–97 %. The sites without one are mostly government pages and German public broadcasters (ARD, tagesschau, NDR…), which measure with a single analytics tool (Piano) and run no ads.

Big US brands are different. Nine of the 104 .com sites show a European visitor no banner at all, and six of them load advertising tools straight away.

Each country also has its favourite banner vendor:

• Czechia: Didomi (32 sites, 10 of them via CPEx) and Seznam's banner (15)
• Slovakia: Didomi (19) and Google's banner (Funding Choices, 16)
• Germany: SourcePoint (28) and Usercentrics (21)
• Austria: OneTrust (19) and Usercentrics (15)
• .com: OneTrust (40 of 92 sites with a banner)

On more than a quarter of sites with a banner it is custom-built or we cannot tell the vendor. We recognise Seznam's and Google's banners by their markup on the page, not by a loaded script.

Data leaves before the visitor clicks

Having a banner is one thing. Whether the site waits for the answer is another. Share of sites that send data to analytics or advertising tools before the visitor responds:

Not every such request means the same thing. Some are Google pings without cookies (so-called advanced Consent Mode), which Google offers precisely for the time before consent. Of the markets we looked at, Czechia uses it most: 61 % of Czech sites with GA4 send them, against 12 % in Germany. Leaving out the pings we verified as cookieless, the gap remains: Czechia 75 %, Austria 49 %.

The “Reject” column only counts sites where our scanner managed to reject the banner, so it cannot be subtracted from the first column (in Austria it comes out higher). We also re-checked 16 sites from Czechia, Slovakia, Germany and .com in a browser on an ordinary home connection; the “sends / does not send before consent” result matched on all of them.

Tools: Google everywhere, the rest is local

Google Analytics 4 runs on 89 % of Czech sites and 95 % of Slovak ones, but on only 52 % in Germany. There we see Adobe Analytics more often (20 % vs 5 % in Czechia). Some GA4 may also hide behind server-side measurement that we cannot see from outside. Google Ads, by contrast, is flat everywhere at 79–88 %.

Czech sites run the most tools (median 10, elsewhere 8) and have their own ad ecosystem:

• Seznam Sklik is on 64 % of Czech sites and almost nowhere else.
• Gemius (media audience measurement) is on 42 % in Czechia and 30 % in Slovakia. We did not find it in Germany, Austria or on .com.
• Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar (session recordings and heatmaps) are about twice as common in Czechia and Slovakia as in Germany. Clarity is on 43 % of Czech sites and just 8 % of .com.

Elsewhere other tools stand out: Germany runs A/B tests in Kameleoon (17 %), big .com sites use the Snapchat Pixel (19 %).

What to take from this

A banner usually looks fine. Behind it, though, there are often more tools than you think, and some of them start sending data immediately. One GTM tag firing “on all pages” is enough for the banner to wait for nothing.

Try it yourself: open your site in a private window, click “Reject” and check in the developer tools (Network tab) what the site keeps sending. Or check your site for free: it goes through the page before consent, after accepting and after rejecting.

Data: 558 sites from the AnalyticsProof leaderboard (Czechia 118, Slovakia 112, Germany 115, Austria 109, .com 104), one scan per site from the EU, latest scan September–October 2026. The leaderboard is a selection of large sites by sector, not a random sample of the web.