Half the EU sites we measured tracked us before we could answer the banner
On 29 July 2026 we crawled 1,845 European domains and watched what left the browser before we touched anything. A tracker fired before any click, keypress or banner choice on 641 of them. What share that is depends on what you divide by: 48.8% of the 1,314 rows that loaded at all, or 54.0% of the 1,186 rows that produced any detection. Both bases are explained below, and every breakdown in this post is computed on the narrower one. The median site made its first third-party request 419 ms after the scan started (n=1,062), which is quicker than most people can find the cookie dialog, let alone read it.
We measured it with two instruments rather than one: a Playwright crawler for the corpus, and Statable GDPR Checker, our free extension, which runs the same 101 signatures in a real browser on a real tab. They agree on most sites and disagree in ways worth reading, which is the second half of this post.