State of Cookieless Analytics 2026
A data-first, mid-year review of what cookieless measurement actually recorded in 2026: the month-by-month search referral mix, the desktop/mobile split, and browser share — all measured live across the BYOViral public network, with no cookies and no sampling.
Why 2026 is a cookieless year
Cookieless analytics stopped being a niche preference and became the default consideration for new projects. Google formally walked back third-party cookie deprecation in April 2025, adopting a "user choice" model in Chrome — but first-party analytics cookies still trigger consent banners under GDPR/ePrivacy, and every banner costs measured traffic. Tools that never set cookies, like BYOViral, measure every visit without a consent wall while storing no cross-site identifiers.
This report is deliberately narrow: it publishes only what the BYOViral public network actually measured in 2026, month by month. It is not a claim about the whole web — it is a transparent, reproducible sample with a published methodology and sample-size disclosure.
Search referral mix by month (share of search pageviews)
How these figures are built
Period: April 18, 2026 to October 9, 2026. Based on 18,937,663 pageviews from 62 public websites that use BYOViral; private sites are never included. These sites are not a random sample of the web, so read the shares as a picture of this network rather than of the whole internet.
Visits from hosting and cloud networks (identified by network owner, using DB-IP ASN data) and known crawlers are labeled as bots and left out. Last updated: October 9, 2026.
| Month | Bing | DuckDuckGo | Yahoo | Ecosia | Search PV | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04 | 20.7% | 35.6% | 28.7% | 10.3% | 2.1% | 41,028 |
| 2026-05 | 29.5% | 32.3% | 21.7% | 10.5% | 2.1% | 132,928 |
| 2026-06 | 20.1% | 37.3% | 23.4% | 12.3% | 3.1% | 60,884 |
| 2026-07 | 45.1% | 24.2% | 15.9% | 8.7% | 2.5% | 36,272 |
| 2026-08 | 21.7% | 32.0% | 30.5% | 8.5% | 3.5% | 36,268 |
| 2026-09 | 61.8% | 18.1% | 10.7% | 5.4% | 1.7% | 102,460 |
| 2026-10 * | 81.3% | 9.1% | 4.7% | 2.7% | 0.6% | 151,758 |
* current month, partial. Bing's lead partly reflects the network's desktop-heavy, content-site composition — and is consistent with the broader 2026 pattern of Google sending fewer outbound clicks as AI answers absorb queries.
Device split by month (share of pageviews)
| Month | Desktop | Mobile | Tablet | Total PV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04 | 93.7% | 5.8% | 0.5% | 762,211 |
| 2026-05 | 93.1% | 6.8% | 0.1% | 9,672,410 |
| 2026-06 | 87.7% | 12.2% | 0.1% | 3,899,250 |
| 2026-07 | 75.1% | 24.8% | 0.1% | 639,037 |
| 2026-08 | 91.2% | 8.5% | 0.2% | 716,120 |
| 2026-09 | 94.6% | 5.3% | 0.1% | 1,850,451 |
| 2026-10 * | 95.3% | 4.6% | 0.1% | 1,430,898 |
Browser share by month (share of pageviews)
| Month | Chrome | Firefox | Edge | Safari | Opera Mobile | Total PV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04 | 90.1% | 1.6% | 4.3% | 2.5% | 0.1% | 759,737 |
| 2026-05 | 97.7% | 0.4% | 0.9% | 0.7% | 0.0% | 9,661,808 |
| 2026-06 | 96.2% | 1.0% | 1.2% | 1.1% | 0.2% | 3,892,192 |
| 2026-07 | 87.2% | 3.6% | 2.9% | 5.1% | 0.4% | 636,000 |
| 2026-08 | 85.9% | 4.4% | 3.5% | 4.8% | 0.3% | 713,823 |
| 2026-09 | 91.7% | 3.9% | 2.0% | 1.8% | 0.0% | 1,846,523 |
| 2026-10 * | 91.5% | 5.0% | 1.8% | 1.2% | 0.0% | 1,427,580 |
CSV with month, search engine, share and pageviews. CC BY 4.0 — please link back when citing.
Methodology and honest caveats
All numbers come from the same privacy-filtered aggregate that powers Global Stats: anonymous pageviews from public, opt-in BYOViral sites, aggregated daily. Shares are normalized within each month, so months are comparable even though absolute volume varies as sites join or leave the network. The current month is always partial. Referrer-based measurements undercount sources that strip the Referer header (many AI assistants and some apps do). No cookies, fingerprint hashes or persistent identifiers are used anywhere in this dataset.
Related reading: Search Engine Referral Share 2026, Operating System Share 2026, Device Category Share 2026, and Country Traffic Trends 2026.