What does clinicaltrials.gov track?
Before any consent, clinicaltrials.gov loaded 3 tracking companies and set 3 advertising or analytics cookies.
That's more tracking companies than 58% of the 2,450 sites we scanned.
Scanned October 2, 2026 from Germany, loading clinicaltrials.gov once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 3
- Tracking cookies
- 3
- Third-party hosts
- 9
- Cookies in total
- 6
Consent banner
No known consent management platform was detected on the page.
Companies contacted before consent
3 of the 5 companies it contacted before consent were analytics companies.
- Qualtrics16 requestsAnalytics
siteintercept.qualtrics.com, zndikywqsjiuwn0q5-nlmenterprise.siteintercept.qualtrics.com, iad1.qualtrics.com
- Google Analytics5 requestsAnalytics
www.googletagmanager.com, region1.google-analytics.com
- Digital Analytics Program (DAP)2 requestsAnalytics
dap.digitalgov.gov
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
- nih.gov5 requestsUnclassified
cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Google1 requestFunctional
fonts.gstatic.com
Cookies set before consent
The longest-lived tracking cookie it set was _ga, from Google Analytics, lasting about 13 months.
| Cookie | Purpose | Set by | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| _ga | Analytics | clinicaltrials.gov | 13 months |
| _ga_CSLL4ZEK4L | Analytics | clinicaltrials.gov | 13 months |
| _ga_DP2X732JSX | Analytics | clinicaltrials.gov | 13 months |
| ncbi_pinger | Unclassified | clinicaltrials.gov | Session |
| ncbi_sid | Unclassified | clinicaltrials.gov | 12 months |
| pinger_sid | Unclassified | clinicaltrials.gov | 12 months |
The page also wrote 2 keys to local storage, which works like a cookie but isn't sent with requests.
Understanding this page
- How to see which cookies and trackers a website loads
A hands-on walkthrough for checking what a site sets before you've clicked anything, using Chrome and Firefox's built-in tools, plus how CookieTosser automates the same check every month.
- What counts as valid cookie consent in the EU
The rules that actually govern cookie banners — the ePrivacy Directive, the GDPR consent standard, the Planet49 ruling, the strictly-necessary exemption, and what "reject" has to offer compared with "accept.
- Consent management platforms explained
What a CMP banner is actually doing behind the scenes, how the IAB's TCF standard and Google's Consent Mode v2 fit in, and why a banner being present is no guarantee that nothing loads before you answer it.