Rawsoft Website Privacy Index · 2026 Edition

Most sites never ask

We scanned 4,904 public websites and scored 4,815 of them on what actually happens to a visitor before they agree to anything. The finding is not that consent is done badly. It's that on four sites in five, consent isn't asked for at all.

This index covers restaurant, hospitality and independent ecommerce sites. It is not a sample of the web as a whole, and the figures should not be read as one. Every figure describes what an automated scan could observe on a public page. A site recorded as having no consent platform detected may run one the scanner could not see, and an absence of findings is not a clean bill of health.

92.7% of sites had no consent platform detected 4,462 of 4,815
44.1% ran Google tags with no Consent Mode signal 2,124 of 4,815
9.2% showed a working Consent Mode v2 signal 442 of 4,815
22.1% of sites that had a banner still tracked anyway 78 of 353 with a platform detected

The population

Sorting every site by what the scan could observe gives four groups. The largest by a wide margin is the one with nothing in place: no consent platform, and no privacy preferences link either.

Where 4,815 sites land

Four in five sites had neither a consent platform nor a privacy preferences link the scanner could find.

12.6%Exposed80.0%Unprotected
GatedPartialExposedUnprotected

Rawsoft Website Privacy Index · n = 4,815 · scanned January to February 2026

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TierSitesShare
Gated611.3%
Partial2926.1%
Exposed60912.6%
Unprotected3,85380.0%

Privacy score distribution

The mass sits at the bottom. 1,631 sites scored zero, and the mean was 18.2 out of 100.

05541,1091,6642,218 0-9: 1,633 sites10-19: 278 sites20-29: 2,218 sites30-39: 356 sites40-49: 34 sites50-59: 5 sites60-69: 18 sites70-79: 0 sites80-89: 195 sites90-99: 78 sites2,218 0-910-1920-2930-3940-4950-5960-6970-7980-8990-99 Privacy score

Rawsoft Website Privacy Index · n = 4,815 · scanned January to February 2026

Show the data
Score bandSites
0-91,633
10-19278
20-292,218
30-39356
40-4934
50-595
60-6918
70-790
80-89195
90-9978

Having a banner is not the same as being gated

353 sites had a consent platform the scanner could see. That's 7.3% of the sample. Within that group, 78 sites still fired tracking before any interaction, or kept firing after a refusal.

Those are two different failures and they're worth separating. 37 sites tracked before the visitor touched the banner. The rest passed that test and then ignored the answer. A banner that appears on time and is then overruled by the tags behind it is, from the visitor's side, no banner at all.

Consent platforms detected, by vendor

Counted across the 353 sites where a consent platform was detected. A vendor could be identified on 170 of them; the remaining 183 ran something the scanner could not attribute, so this is a share of identifiable platforms rather than of the whole market.

OneTrust84CookieYes49Cookiebot18iubenda13Termly6

Rawsoft Website Privacy Index · n = 170 · scanned January to February 2026

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VendorSites detected
OneTrust84
CookieYes49
Cookiebot18
iubenda13
Termly6

Verticals separate more than expected

Ecommerce sites carry more tags and more scrutiny, and it shows. Restaurants sit at the other end. Both cuts are drawn from the same crawl and the same scan, so the gap between them is a real difference in practice rather than a difference in method.

Consent posture by vertical

Verticals with at least 300 scanned sites. Ecommerce runs consent tooling roughly twice as often as restaurants do.

Restaurantsn = 1,152Restaurants Gated: 13 sitesRestaurants Partial: 50 sitesRestaurants Exposed: 137 sites12%Restaurants Unprotected: 952 sites83%Ecommercen = 457Ecommerce Gated: 5 sitesEcommerce Partial: 50 sites11%Ecommerce Exposed: 107 sites23%Ecommerce Unprotected: 295 sites65%
GatedPartialExposedUnprotected

Rawsoft Website Privacy Index · n = 1,609 · scanned January to February 2026

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VerticalSitesGatedPartialExposedUnprotected
Restaurants1,1521.1%4.3%11.9%82.6%
Ecommerce4571.1%10.9%23.4%64.6%

Mean privacy score by vertical

020406080100Restaurants14.6Ecommerce26.9Mean privacy score (0-100)

Rawsoft Website Privacy Index · n = 1,609 · scanned January to February 2026

Show the data
VerticalMean scoreSites
Restaurants14.61,152
Ecommerce26.9457

What we deliberately did not publish

We can measure how often sites running each consent platform still leaked, and the per-vendor numbers differ sharply. We're not publishing them. The largest vendor group in this crawl has 84 sites in it and the smallest has a handful, which is nowhere near enough to characterise a product used on millions of sites. Leak rates also track configuration far more than they track the tool.

We also excluded 54 sites that scored a perfect 100 because the scanner found nothing to fail them on. An empty result is not a clean site, and a leaderboard built on absence of evidence would be worthless to everyone reading it.

How this was measured

Each site was loaded the way a first-time visitor loads it. The scan recorded whether a consent platform appeared, when it appeared, what fired before anyone interacted with it, what fired after a refusal, and whether a privacy preferences link was reachable.

Tiers describe the mechanism observed, not the company. They are assigned from what the scan saw rather than from the score, because the score awards points where a vendor simply isn't present, and that would flatter sites that run no tags at all.

  • Gated. Consent platform detected, Consent Mode v2 observed, no tracking seen before consent or after denial
  • Partial. Consent platform detected, but with gaps: no Consent Mode v2 signal, or tracking seen anyway
  • Exposed. No consent platform detected, though a privacy or cookie preferences link was found
  • Unprotected. No consent platform and no privacy preferences link detected

Records: 4,904 scanned, 4,815 carrying a privacy result. Crawl window: January to February 2026. Nothing here is a legal conclusion, and no site is described as compliant or non-compliant.

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