YouTube

Social media

YouTube loaded on 144 sites in our October 2026 scan: 6% of the 2,450 most-visited sites we checked, before any visitor had given consent.

Category: Social media. A company can do several jobs; this is its main role on the pages we saw.

Its cookies typically last about 6 months. Only 45% of the sites where it loaded had a consent banner visible at all. It's especially common on .it sites: 14% of them load it, versus 6% of all sites we scanned.

About YouTube

YouTube is Google's video platform, embedded on other sites through its own player rather than Google's ad or analytics domains.

Embedding a video loads player code and thumbnails from youtube.com and ytimg.com, which can set cookies such as YSC and VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE even before playback starts. Using the youtube-nocookie.com domain for an embed avoids most of this, though not every site does.

Often loaded alongside

Sites that load YouTube most often also load Google Analytics (85%), Google (80%), Google Ads (78%), Meta (28%), and Adobe (22%).

Domains it loads from

www.youtube.com
i.ytimg.com
img.youtube.com
www.youtube-nocookie.com
yt3.ggpht.com
rr3---sn-ajaig5-51.googlevideo.com
rr4---sn-aigzrn7e.googlevideo.com
rr2---sn-aigzrnss.googlevideo.com
rr1---sn-ajaig5-58.googlevideo.com

Cookies

Sites that load YouTube

The highest-ranked 30 of 144 sites.

slack.com6 tracking companies
tp-link.com2 tracking companies
stanford.edu4 tracking companies
steamcommunity.com1 tracking company
mikrotik.com1 tracking company
trendmicro.com8 tracking companies
uol.com.br17 tracking companies
berkeley.edu4 tracking companies
usda.gov4 tracking companies
frontiersin.org4 tracking companies

Show 20 more sites

worldbank.org9 tracking companies
xerox.com4 tracking companies
elmundo.es20 tracking companies
ox.ac.uk4 tracking companies
marca.com9 tracking companies
nypost.com8 tracking companies
clarin.com13 tracking companies
inven.co.kr4 tracking companies
elconfidencial.com6 tracking companies
mundodeportivo.com13 tracking companies
ilfattoquotidiano.it4 tracking companies
grow.google2 tracking companies
meteofrance.com5 tracking companies
gst.gov.in2 tracking companies
ucla.edu5 tracking companies
oricon.co.jp36 tracking companies
nikkansports.com7 tracking companies
bookmyshow.com5 tracking companies
ilmeteo.it9 tracking companies
cronista.com9 tracking companies

Understanding this page

What the tracker categories mean
What "advertising," "analytics," "social," "consent" and the rest actually mean for a company or a cookie, and how CookieTosser decides which one applies.
First-party vs third-party cookies (and why "first-party" still tracks you)
What the distinction actually means technically, why browsers only block one of the two, and how CNAME cloaking, server-side tagging and cookies like _ga let sites keep tracking under their own domain.
How to block or limit trackers
Browser privacy settings, content blockers, Global Privacy Control and clearing cookies compared honestly — what each one actually stops, what it doesn't, and what it costs you in return.