Google Analytics Market Share (2026)

Google Analytics is the default measurement tool of the web, and it is not close. But the default has been eroding: its share has slipped several points since 2021, EU regulators spent two years ruling against it, and the forced migration to GA4 pushed many teams to look around for the first time in a decade. This page collects the numbers.

Share of all websites

W3Techs, which surveys the technology stack of the top ten million websites on an ongoing basis, reports in 2026 that Google Analytics is used by about 43 percent of all websites. Among websites that use any detectable traffic analysis tool, its share is roughly 78 percent.

Coverage rises with site popularity. W3Techs data shows Google Analytics on more than 80 percent of the top one million websites that use a traffic analysis tool. BuiltWith's independent technology tracking similarly counts tens of millions of live websites with Google Analytics installed, making it one of the most widely deployed pieces of third-party code on the internet.

The trend since 2021

The direction matters more than the level. According to W3Techs historical data, Google Analytics held around 86 percent of the analytics market in 2021. By early 2025 that had fallen to roughly 78 percent, where it has since hovered. A few points of a very large market is a lot of websites: each percentage point represents tens of thousands of sites in the surveyed population.

Three forces drove the decline over that period:

• Regulatory pressure in Europe, where authorities in Austria, France, Italy, Denmark, and the Nordic countries ruled between 2022 and 2023 that Google Analytics' US data transfers violated the GDPR. The GDPR fines statistics page covers those decisions.
• The Universal Analytics shutdown, which turned a passive default into an active migration decision.
• The growth of lightweight, privacy-focused alternatives that need no consent banner.

The Universal Analytics sunset

Google announced in March 2022 that Universal Analytics would be retired. Standard UA properties stopped processing hits on 1 July 2023, UA 360 properties on 1 October 2023. Historical data went read-only and was then deleted, with access closing from July 2024. There was no import path: GA4 could not ingest UA history, so long-running sites lost continuity of their records unless they exported data themselves.

The migration was contentious. Google auto-created GA4 properties for accounts that had not migrated by March 2023, and industry surveys through the transition found widespread dissatisfaction with GA4's interface, data lag, and discrepancies against UA numbers. For many teams the sunset was the moment the switching cost of leaving Google dropped to zero, since they had to rebuild reporting either way. That, as much as privacy, explains the timing of the alternative tools' growth.

The rise of privacy-focused alternatives

The alternative market splits into two camps. Self-hosted tools, led by Matomo, keep data on the site owner's own infrastructure; Matomo reports more than 1.5 million websites using it and is one of the few tools the French CNIL has recognized as configurable to run without tracking consent. Hosted cookieless tools form the second camp: lightweight scripts that use no cookies and store no personal data, which places measurement outside the GDPR consent requirement entirely.

Individually, each alternative registers under one percent of all websites in W3Techs data, which says less about them than about the sheer size of the installed Google base. The more telling numbers are directional: the category barely existed in 2019, and it now accounts for a visible and growing slice of the analytics market while Google's share declines year over year.

There is also a quiet third option in the data: sites with no analytics at all. Just under half of websites show no detectable traffic analysis tool, a mix of dormant sites, server-log measurement, and owners who dropped tracking rather than deal with consent requirements.

What the numbers mean

Google Analytics will remain the market leader for years; a 78 percent share does not unwind quickly. But the monoculture of the 2010s is over. Regulators established that analytics data is personal data, the UA sunset broke a decade of inertia, and consent banners mean the default tool no longer sees all traffic in Europe, as the cookie consent statistics show.

Analyse sits in the cookieless camp: no cookies, no personal data, no consent banner needed, with website analytics that counts every visitor. The GDPR-compliant analytics guide explains the legal footing.

Sources

• W3Techs: Google Analytics usage and market share
• W3Techs: Usage statistics of traffic analysis tools
• W3Techs: Google Analytics vs Matomo vs Plausible comparison
• Matomo: privacy-first analytics platform
• noyb: EU DPA decisions ordering a stop to Google Analytics
• Search Engine Land: Universal Analytics still processing data after sunset