Cookie banners are everywhere. Actual consent, it turns out, is not.
I run a small consent tool, and I kept seeing the same thing on customer sites: a banner sitting politely at the bottom of the page while Google Analytics had already fired, set its cookie, and phoned home. The banner was theater. The tracking happened on load, before anyone clicked a thing.
So I built a scanner to measure how common that actually is, pointed it at 1,775 real websites, and logged exactly what loaded before consent. Here are the numbers, how the detection works, and the caveats that keep the numbers honest.
The one number that matters
On 30% of sites, a real tracker fired before any consent was given.
