# Cookie study 2026: trackers before consent in EU shops

> We loaded 352 online shops from 14 EU countries without touching the cookie banner: 69 % loaded analytics or advertising services, 73 % Google Fonts. Method and limits.

Source: https://konformia.at/en/cookie-study

Data, October 2026

# Trackers before consent: we measured 352 online shops in 14 EU countries

We opened each shop, never touched the cookie banner and logged every request. The result: a banner on the page does not mean the trackers wait for it.

**69 %** of the shops load analytics or advertising services such as Meta Pixel or Google Analytics before anyone agrees in the cookie banner.

352 shops, 20 hits re-checked by hand

**73 %** of the shops load Google Fonts from Google’s servers before anyone agrees. Each of these requests sends the visitor’s IP address to Google.

258 of 352 shops, 20 shops re-checked by hand

## Method

- **Sample:** 352 online shops from Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. A shop counts only if we reached a product page with a price or the checkout.

- **Date:** 10 and 11 October 2026.

- **Measurement:** a headless Chrome loads up to 10 pages per shop, never clicks the cookie banner and logs every request and cookie.

- **Counter:** a shop counts when at least one service of the group loads before consent. Before a hit counts, the home page is loaded again with a normal browser user agent.

- **Hand check:** 20 hits per number opened again in a normal Chrome. For Google Fonts, 13 of the 15 flagged shops still loaded the fonts on the home page alone; the other 2 did not on the home page (the crawl read subpages, or the shop changed it since).

## What this means

Most of these shops have a cookie banner. It often blocks the analytics tags but not the fonts, maps or embeds that come with the theme, outside the banner’s control. How to find the source: [Google Fonts: find the source](https://konformia.at/en/guides/google-fonts-find-source) and [Cookies before consent](https://konformia.at/en/guides/cookies-before-consent).

## Limits

- A snapshot of two days. Shops change their setup; the numbers describe October 2026.

- The sample is not representative of every shop in a country, and the countries are not weighted.

- We name no shop, and we make no legal judgement. We measure what loads and when.

## How to cite

konformia.at, Cookie study October 2026: 352 online shops in 14 EU countries. https://konformia.at/en/cookie-study

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