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As Google Analytics Turns 10, We Ask: How Many Websites Use It?

Google hasn't offered an update in years, but estimates suggest as many as 30–50 million websites use Google Analytics.

Matt McGee on November 12, 2015 at 3:20 pm

Google is celebrating today the 10th birthday of Google Analytics.

In a blog post, Google engineering VP Paul Muret recounts 10 of his highlights from the product’s development over the past decade — things like Event Tracking, Real-Time Reporting and Tag Management.

Google Analytics was born from the company’s Urchin Software purchase in early 2005 and has since become the undisputed leader in website analytics installations. But that begs the commonly asked question: How many websites are using Google Analytics?

Google has remained tightlipped about that for several years. In 2012, then-Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said more than 10 million websites used Google Analytics — the last official update that we’re aware of from Mountain View. We invited Google earlier today to provide an updated count for this article, but the company hasn’t replied to that request. (UPDATE, 7:00 pm ET: A Google spokesperson declined to update the previous figure.)

As we pointed out in 2012, Google may have been giving a very conservative count then, and the number has surely grown much higher in the intervening three years.

How Many Websites Use Google Analytics?

In lieu of an official (and accurate) number from Google, there are a number of other sources that provide estimates. BuiltWith, a website that tracks what software is used on websites across the internet, knows of 29.3 million websites using Google Analytics, which comes out to 8.4 percent of the 348 million websites tracked in its database.

BuiltWith says that 69.5 percent of Quantcast’s Top 10,000 sites (based on traffic) are using Google Analytics, and 54.6 percent of the top million websites that it tracks.

For the sake of comparison, that 29.3 million figure above is about double what BuiltWith reported back in April 2012.

There are other data sources, too:

According to W3Techs, Google Analytics is being used by 52.9 percent of all websites on the internet, more than 10 times the next most popular analytics option, Yandex Metrics. W3Techs doesn’t offer a raw count of installs across the internet, only a percentage based on the 10 million websites that it monitors.

The Datanyze service reports that more than 13.2 million of the websites it tracks are using Google Analytics. Datanyze doesn’t specifically say how many websites it tracks but calls it an eight-figure number.

Finally, the SimilarTech service estimates that a little more than 48 million websites are using Google Analytics, the highest raw count estimate we’ve found.

Because all of these services have different methodologies (which you should be able to track down by visiting the links to their data) and track different analytics tools, it’s difficult to come to a definitive count and percentage of how many websites are using Google Analytics. So until Google itself decides to provide an update, it seems safe to say that the number is in the tens of millions. And no one disputes that it’s far and away the most popular web analytics software in use today — quite a birthday present.

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.