We Scanned 200 Dealer Websites. Here's What's Actually Running on Them.

We scanned 200 dealer websites. Not the marketing on them. The code underneath.

Here is the uncomfortable part: almost no dealer can tell you what is actually running on their own site. The average one we scanned loaded code from about 40 different third-party domains, firing through 5 separate Google Analytics tags and 7 different tag manager containers. Most of it piled up over years of vendor turnover, and nobody ever cleaned up.

What did the scan actually look at?

We loaded 200 franchise dealer homepages the same way a shopper's browser does, from a normal residential connection, and recorded every tag and tracker that loaded or fired. We only looked at the public homepage. We did not log into anything, and a scan like this cannot see who has password access to your accounts, only what is wired into the page.

Of the 200 sites, 180 gave a clean, full read. Every number below comes from those, and where bot-blocking or server-side setups limited what we could see, we left the site out rather than guess. So these are conservative floors, not ceilings.

How many third-party domains does the average dealer site load?

About 40.

A good chunk of that is ordinary plumbing: hosting, payments, chat, accessibility, cookie consent. The rest is measurement and advertising tags, and it is worth being honest about how they got there, because this is where most "tag bloat" articles go off the rails.

Most of these tags are not rogue spyware. Things like Adobe's audience platform or a LiveRamp identity pixel are usually placed on dealer sites by the OEM's digital program, the website platform, or an ad agency, for legitimate co-op advertising and retargeting. That part is normal.

The problem is not that they exist. The problem is that the dealer usually has no idea they are there, cannot say who installed them or whether they are still authorized, and never knowingly signed their shoppers up for any of it. And when a vendor relationship ends, the tag almost never leaves with it.

Who actually owns your numbers?

Nobody. That is the real cost of running 5 separate Google Analytics tags through 7 containers.

When five different parties are each measuring your site through their own tags, your reports never quite agree, and no one can give you a straight answer on traffic or leads. You end up judging vendors and setting budgets off numbers that quietly contradict each other.

There is a speed cost too, just not the one people usually claim. These tags do not block your page from loading. But every one of them is third-party JavaScript that runs on each visit, and stacked up, that is why loading more and more tags through Tag Manager drags your PageSpeed score down. We see that drop on dealer sites again and again.

The clearest waste: dead tags

Four in ten sites we scanned were still loading dead Universal Analytics tags. Google stopped processing standard Universal Analytics in 2023. Those tags collect nothing and report nothing. They just load on every page, pure dead weight, often years after anyone stopped looking.

That is the tell. If a tag Google turned off two years ago is still firing on your site, what else is on there that nobody is watching?

How do I see what's on my site?

We built a free tool that scans your homepage and shows you every Google account, tag manager container, and third-party tracker loading on it, in about 15 seconds. No login required to run it. It even drafts the email you can hand your website vendor asking them to pull the dead and unused tags out.

Scan your site free.

Run it once. We would bet there is at least one tag on there you cannot explain. That is the one worth a conversation with your vendor.