What does ycombinator.com track?
Before any consent, ycombinator.com loaded 3 tracking companies and set 4 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.ycombinator.com once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 3
- Tracking cookies
- 4
- Third-party hosts
- 13
- Cookies in total
- 8
Consent banner
No known consent management platform was detected on the page.
Companies contacted before consent
2 of the 6 companies it contacted before consent were analytics companies.
- Google Ads2 requestsAdvertising
stats.g.doubleclick.net, www.google.de
- Google Analytics5 requestsAnalytics
www.google-analytics.com, www.googletagmanager.com, region1.analytics.google.com
- PostHog4 requestsAnalytics
us-assets.i.posthog.com, app.posthog.com, us.i.posthog.com
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
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 | ycombinator.com | 13 months |
| _ga_CHJJ1RJL5K | Analytics | ycombinator.com | 13 months |
| _gat | Analytics | ycombinator.com | Under a day |
| _gid | Analytics | ycombinator.com | 1 day |
| _bf_session_exists | Unclassified | www.ycombinator.com | Session |
| _bf_session_key | Unclassified | www.ycombinator.com | Session |
| ph_phc_kqzJJG8aN5nevL0k1oW4Z8iAGswsxBnsWqIBcOuxj… | Unclassified | ycombinator.com | 12 months |
| XSRF-TOKEN | Necessary | www.ycombinator.com | Session |
The page also wrote 4 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.