What does howtogeek.com track?
Before any consent, howtogeek.com loaded 3 tracking companies and set 2 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 www.howtogeek.com once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 3
- Tracking cookies
- 2
- Third-party hosts
- 17
- Cookies in total
- 8
Consent banner
No known consent management platform was detected on the page.
Companies contacted before consent
2 of the 7 companies it contacted before consent were advertising companies.
- Valnet Ads8 requestsAdvertising
cdn.adsninja.ca, adsninja.ca, scribe.adforge.io
- Google Ads3 requestsAdvertising
pagead2.googlesyndication.com, stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google.de
- Google Analytics3 requestsAnalytics
www.googletagmanager.com, www.google-analytics.com, region1.analytics.google.com
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
- howtogeekimages.com64 requestsUnclassified
static0.howtogeekimages.com
- Google3 requestsFunctional
accounts.google.com, news.google.com
- Valnet4 requestsContent delivery
images.valnetcdn.com, cdn.sentinelpro.com, valnetv3.sentinelpro.com, secure.valnetinc.com
- jsDelivr1 requestContent delivery
cdn.jsdelivr.net
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 | howtogeek.com | 13 months |
| _ga_PVR2ZX9X91 | Analytics | howtogeek.com | 13 months |
| articlesLimitDepth | Unclassified | www.howtogeek.com | Under a day |
| promotionVisitedLinks | Unclassified | www.howtogeek.com | 13 months |
| sentinelbi_utmData | Unclassified | www.howtogeek.com | 13 months |
| valnet-identity-sync | Unclassified | www.howtogeek.com | 13 months |
| viewType | Unclassified | www.howtogeek.com | Session |
| g_state | Functional | www.howtogeek.com | 6 months |
The page also wrote 6 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.