What is the _ga cookie?
ID used to identify users.
Our October 2026 scan found it on 700 sites (29% of the 2,450 we scanned), set before any consent.
- Purpose
- Analytics
- Belongs to
- Google Analytics
- Set as
- First-party on 100% of sites, third-party on under 1%
- Typical lifetime
- 13 months (vendor says: 2 years) — shorter than the vendor documents
Sites that set _ga before consent
The highest-ranked 30 of 700 sites.
- wordpress.org2 tracking companies
- yuga.com5 tracking companies
- base.org2 tracking companies
- creativecommons.org2 tracking companies
- duckdns.org2 tracking companies
- pki.goog1 tracking company
- medium.com2 tracking companies
- android.com1 tracking company
- ipify.org4 tracking companies
- scorecardresearch.com1 tracking company
Show 20 more sites
- nist.gov3 tracking companies
- who.int3 tracking companies
- namecheap.com4 tracking companies
- ok.ru6 tracking companies
- harvard.edu4 tracking companies
- media.net6 tracking companies
- nasa.gov3 tracking companies
- stanford.edu4 tracking companies
- globo.com24 tracking companies
- dropcatch.com2 tracking companies
- line.me1 tracking company
- huawei.com2 tracking companies
- fandom.com3 tracking companies
- indiatimes.com18 tracking companies
- trendmicro.com8 tracking companies
- digitalocean.com3 tracking companies
- uol.com.br17 tracking companies
- eset.com3 tracking companies
- cornell.edu3 tracking companies
- usatoday.com0 tracking companies
Related cookies
Other cookies from Google Analytics.
- _ga_*685 sites
- _gid185 sites
- _gat*108 sites
- _gat_gtag_*55 sites
- FPID29 sites
How to stop it
Declining non-essential cookies in a site's consent banner should stop _ga being set on later visits. Blocking third-party cookies in your browser settings stops the third-party kind everywhere, and clearing cookies for a site removes any it already set.
Description from the Open Cookie Database (Apache 2.0).
Understanding this page
- How cookie lifetimes work, and why a 13-month _ga matters
What a cookie's "expires" field actually controls, why Google Analytics ships a 2-year default that many sites cut down to 13 months, and how Safari's 7-day cap on script-set cookies changes the picture.
- 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.