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webtracking-data

Open reference data for the web-tracking ecosystem, maintained by webtracking.org. Explorable at data.webtracking.org; measured against 15.7M real pages in the public HTTP Archive crawl for The State of Web Tracking.

Why this exists: the best-known tracker entity graph is licensed CC BY-NC-SA — NonCommercial, ShareAlike — which makes it unusable inside most real products. These datasets are CC BY 4.0: use them commercially, just say where they came from.

Datasets

File What it is Records
datasets/entities.json domain → parent-entity ownership map 43 entities / 102 domains
datasets/cookies.json cookie-name classification rules (vendor + purpose) 85 rules
datasets/ai-crawlers.json AI crawler UA tokens with operator + purpose (training / retrieval / search) 14
datasets/ai-referrers.json AI-assistant referral signatures (referrer hosts, utm_source tokens) 11
datasets/crosswalks/categories.json our category vocabulary ↔ IAB TCF purposes ↔ Tracker Radar (approximate) 10
datasets/queues/*.json the curation queues — what to research next, ranked by measured impact 98 + 35
crawl/2026-06/*.csv per-chart aggregates from the report (adoption, entities, cookies, AI-robots, consent, CWV…) 17 files

Every record carries provenance (how we know) and last_verified (when a human last checked). status is active | deprecated | merged | disputed.

Stable JSON endpoints

Once deployed, every dataset is served versioned:

https://data.webtracking.org/v1/latest/entities.json     (moving)
https://data.webtracking.org/v1/2026Q3/entities.json     (immutable snapshot)

scripts/build-public.mjs regenerates public/ from datasets/; CI fails if they drift.

How the data grows — the curation queues

The queues are generated from the crawl itself, so curation effort goes where reality is, in impact order:

  • queues/unmapped-domains.json — the top-200 third-party domains by page reach that no entity owns yet. Working top-down grows the entity map in reach order, not alphabetically.
  • queues/unknown-cookies.json — high-volume cookie names no rule classifies (currently attributed only by the entity of their top-setting domain, or not at all). Each needs a researched cookies.json entry with a source.

Every quarterly crawl regenerates the queues; whatever got curated disappears from them.

Contributing

Corrections and additions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The bar is the same one the report methodology applies to itself: claims carry sources, and substantiated corrections are applied, dated, and credited.

Licenses

  • Datasets (datasets/, crawl/): CC BY 4.0 — attribution: “webtracking.org” with a link.
  • Code (scripts/, public/index.html): MIT.

See LICENSE.md. Crawl aggregates derive from the public HTTP Archive dataset. Not affiliated with any vendor named in the data; names appear for identification.

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Open reference data for the web-tracking ecosystem: entity map, cookie DB, AI crawler & referrer registries, crawl aggregates. CC BY 4.0.

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