The question nobody can answer quickly
Point at any script on your site and ask who added it, and whether anyone still uses it. On most sites, nobody can answer quickly. A tag with no named owner and no purpose on record is the one nobody removes.
We've written about how tags get around the tag manager and the consent platform. This post is the working document that stops it happening again. It's about ownership, not detection.
Where the gap is widest
Restaurant sites are the worked example here, because that's where our index shows the widest gap. Of 31,167 restaurant sites scored between January and November 2026, 25,689 (82.4%) had no consent platform and no privacy preferences link detected, and 132 reached the Gated tier. The template itself works for any site.
The eight columns
This is our recommendation, not an industry standard. Eight columns is enough to make every row ownable without turning the sheet into a project:
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| 1. Tag or vendor | The name you'd recognize, plus the vendor. |
| 2. What it does | One line. If nobody can write it, that's a finding. |
| 3. Where it loads | Tag manager, page template, or a third-party domain. |
| 4. Who added it | A person or an agency, not a department. |
| 5. Date added | Even an approximate one. |
| 6. Business owner today | Who would notice if it disappeared. |
| 7. Consent category | Which category it should sit in: necessary, analytics, advertising, functional. |
| 8. Still needed? | Yes, no or unknown. Unknown is the honest default. |
Download the template as a CSV.
Fill it from the browser, not from memory
Don't start by asking people what they added. Start from what the browser actually loads. Open your homepage and your order flow in a private window with developer tools on the Network tab, and list every third-party domain that receives a request. Then assign owners. The Trackers That Never Pass Through Your Tag Manager explains why observation beats asking.
The three decisions the sheet forces
Once every row has an owner, or an honest unknown, each tag ends up in one of three places:
- Remove it. No owner, no purpose, still loading.
- Move it into the tag manager. It's needed, but it loads from the template.
- Assign its consent category. So the consent platform can govern it.
Keep it alive
A tag inventory is out of date the day after a campaign launches. Three habits keep it current: one named owner for the sheet, a new row with every campaign launch, and a quarterly review of everything marked unknown. Your Vendor Changed 200 Things On Your Site covers the wider change record this sheet feeds.
The free privacy scan shows what loads on your site before a visitor answers, which is a fast first draft of column three.
Source: Rawsoft Website Privacy Index, 47,506 sites scanned and 47,420 scored, January to November 2026. The crawl covers restaurant, hospitality and independent ecommerce sites, so it is not a sample of the whole web.
Rawsoft provides technical implementation and analysis, not legal advice. Please confirm any regulatory interpretation with your counsel.