Intelligence Center · Mid-Year Report

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, no consent banners and no sampling.

By BYO Team Coverage: 2026-04 — 2026-07 (latest month partial) Last updated July 11, 2026
Bing — not Google — has been the #1 search referrer on the BYOViral public network in 2026 year to date, with 34.3% of search-engine referral pageviews versus 25.4% for Google, across 244,353 search referrals observed. BYOViral Intelligence Center, July 2026 · https://www.byoviral.com/intelligence/state-of-cookieless-analytics-2026

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)

Within-month normalized. Classic search engines only — AI answer engines are excluded and tracked separately.
MonthBingGoogleDuckDuckGoYahooEcosiaSearch PV
2026-04 35.6%20.7%28.7%10.3%2.1% 41,028
2026-05 32.3%29.5%21.7%10.5%2.1% 132,928
2026-06 37.3%20.1%23.4%12.3%3.1% 60,884
2026-07 * 36.3%22.5%19.7%13.7%4.1% 9,513

* 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)

Desktop remains dominant on this network, but the mobile share has been climbing all year.
MonthDesktopMobileTabletTotal 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 * 73.5%26.3%0.1% 227,491

Browser share by month (share of pageviews)

Top browsers network-wide. See the live Browser Market Share 2026 report for the full ranking.
MonthChromeEdgeSafariFirefoxOpera MobileTotal PV
2026-04 90.1%4.3%2.5%1.6%0.1% 759,737
2026-05 97.7%0.9%0.7%0.4%0.0% 9,661,808
2026-06 96.2%1.2%1.1%1.0%0.2% 3,892,192
2026-07 * 88.5%2.0%4.2%3.7%0.9% 226,041
Download the dataset
CSV with month, search engine, share and pageviews. CC BY 4.0 — please link back when citing.
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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.