What does wired.com track?
Before any consent, wired.com loaded 2 tracking companies and set 0 advertising or analytics cookies.
That's fewer tracking companies than most sites we scanned: 56% of the 2,450 sites we checked loaded more.
Scanned October 2, 2026 from Germany, loading www.wired.com once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 2
- Tracking cookies
- 0
- Third-party hosts
- 13
- Cookies in total
- 8
Consent banner
The page loaded IAB TCF (unidentified platform), a consent management platform. Everything below was recorded before anyone answered it. 2 tracking companies still loaded while it was unanswered.
Companies contacted before consent
2 of the 6 companies it contacted before consent were functional companies.
- Google Ads2 requestsAdvertising
securepubads.g.doubleclick.net
- Google Analytics2 requestsAnalytics
www.googletagmanager.com
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
- Gladly6 requestsFunctional
cdn.gladly.com
- Google3 requestsFunctional
news.google.com, apis.google.com
- Condé Nast9 requestsContent delivery
fides.condenastdigital.com, globalservices.conde.digital, privacy.condenastdigital.com, ads-static.conde.digital
- Cloudflare1 requestContent delivery
cdnjs.cloudflare.com
Cookies set before consent
| Cookie | Purpose | Set by | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| __cf_ob | Unclassified | www.wired.com | Session |
| CN_geo_country_code | Unclassified | wired.com | 6 months |
| CN_journey_bucket | Unclassified | wired.com | 12 months |
| CN_segments | Unclassified | wired.com | 6 months |
| CN_xid | Unclassified | wired.com | 6 months |
| CN_xid_refresh | Unclassified | wired.com | 12 months |
| xid1 | Unclassified | wired.com | Under a day |
| cf_clearance | Functional | www.wired.com | 12 months |
The page also wrote 13 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.