AdGuard tracker report: December 2024. How much is your traffic contaminated?

All interactive maps used in this report are available here.

With the year 2024 coming to its end, it’s almost mandatory to look back at it in an attempt to find some trends and parallels and draw conclusions. So we will do just that in our fresh ad trackers report, which has quietly become our new yearly tradition. If you missed the previous ones, let us give you the gist of what we’re doing here.

Whenever you visit a web page, your browser makes requests to external servers, and some of these requests may not be as good or useful as the others. A large portion of them are requests to load trackers or ads, and the reality of the Internet is that nearly every ad you see also tracks you. So ad requests are essentially tracker requests too, and that allows us to make a shortcut and call them all ad trackers. Our research has shown that ad trackers constitute 7.84% of the world’s traffic.

The real numbers are even worse. Many ad trackers, if unblocked, can start a chain of more tracking requests that will follow. We call such requests “hidden ad trackers”. We did the math, and on average every ad tracker brings with it 2.14 additional hidden ad trackers down the line. This means, if you don’t block “bad” requests, ad trackers make up 21% of global Internet traffic.

This report doesn’t take into account hidden ad trackers. Instead, we only focus on “raw”, initial requests, and all numbers in the report reflect exactly them.

Compared to the 7.40% the previous report has shown in December 2023, 7.84% may not appear as too big of a jump. However, there seems to be a clear trend of this number rising further and further, as similar research we conducted in February 2023 gave us the ad tracker share of 7.24%. Another concerning data point is that from among 230 countries and territories we monitored for this research, only less than 40 showed some decrease in ad trackers share over the year. For most of the world, the dynamics are not looking well. Let’s have a closer look at individual regions to see what’s going on there.

Europe: a U-turn for the worse

A year ago, Europe displayed an almost uniform drop of ad tracker share compared to February 2023. This time, the picture couldn’t be more different. The majority of the countries on the European subcontinent went up in ad tracker share, with Greece leading the way. Greece’s numbers skyrocketed from 6.86% to 9.47% in under a year. Unsurprisingly, Russia and Spain are closely behind, with 9.38% and 8.85% ad trackers respectively, staying near the top, just like in the previous research. Northern regions remain the only bright spot on Europe’s map, displaying consistently low numbers. Norway dropped even further to 5.17%, and Denmark is the only country to dip below the 5 percent mark with 4.94% — interestingly, coming from a relatively high 6.32% recorded a year ago.

All maps in this article, including this one, are interactive — hover over any country to see its numbers.

Asia: the land of contrast

Looking at the heatmap for Asia, it’s impossible but to notice the stark contrast between some of the countries in the region, and this is something we have already observed in the previous reports. Asia is home to countries with both the lowest overall ad tracker share — China with 2.20% — and the highest — Uzbekistan with 13.84%. Alongside Uzbekistan, such countries as India with 12.48% and South Korea with 10.11% propelled the region to the top.

Not contributing to this trend, the Southeast Asian countries have shown good numbers, ranging from 4.3% for Laos to 6.4% for Myanmar, all well below average. However, the fly in the ointment is the fact that in the last report these same countries showed lower numbers across the board. The increase is small, but uniform and noticeable.

There is no uniformity to the west of the Asian region, though. Syria added almost 3 percentage points to its already high numbers and now sits at 12.52%, while neighbouring Iraq, for example, enjoys a healthy 4.93% share of ad trackers. The biggest oddity of the entire report is easily Iran. After securing a position in the top 3 countries with the highest number of ad trackers twice over the last two reports (11.12%), it displayed a dramatic drop down to just 4.22% this time around. Such a huge change is hard to explain by “natural” causes, so some kind of legislative or other reason must have been behind it.

North and Central Americas: Cuba and the rest

The very first glance at the map shows almost everything there is to know about the region. To the north, Canada and the U.S. go hand-in-hand, with almost identical numbers of 6.49% and 6.61% respectively. Curiously, both have gained a few decimal points compared to last year. In the middle, we have two countries with the highest numbers. Mexico, which used to stay below its northern neighbours not just geographically but also in terms of ad tracker numbers, has overtaken them handily and ended up with 7.49% of ad trackers. Cuba is once again the biggest “loser” of the region, gaining almost yet another 2 percentage points on top of last year’s 9.62%, resulting in 11.44%. Nobody else is even close, with the rest of Central American countries mostly staying within the 6% mark.

Latin America: going up

Not much can be said about Latin America. Just like Europe, after a year of improvement, in 2024 most of the countries gained the lost percentages back, and many with interest. Brazil (7.60%) and Columbia (7.53%) swapped places as #1 and #2, with the rest of the countries landing somewhere between roughly 5% and 7%. The outlier here is Bolivia (4.82%), which is not only the sole country of the region with its share of ad trackers being below the 5% mark, but also the only one that managed to shave a tiny bit off its last year’s result of 4.87%.

Africa: Asia’s twin sister

The ad tracker heatmap for Africa is somewhat akin to that of Asia, but toned down a notch — only a small handful of countries, such as Djibouti with its ad tracker share of 11.58%, clear the 10% bar. Africa is a hodge-podge of lighter and darker red areas, with northern and eastern regions trending towards lower numbers, and central and southern — towards higher ones. Notably, quite a few African countries showed a decline in their ad tracker share. Senegal’s numbers are the most impressive in that regard, dropping from a formidable 8.75% to significantly lower-than-average 6.07%. But there’s no shortage of opposite examples: for instance, Equatorial Guinea went in the opposite direction, jumping from manageable 6.72% straight to 11.23%, which placed it just out of the top 5 most tracker-infected countries in the world.

Highs and lows

Last year, we wrote about how the gap between the tracker-ridden and tracker-free countries had widened. The difference has become only more pronounced in 2024. Uzbekistan has retained the dubious honor of being the country with the largest share of ad trackers in its traffic with a whopping 13.84%. It is curious that a year ago it topped the charts with just 11.44% — a result that wouldn’t be enough to even crack the top 3 this time. Syria, India, Cuba, and South Korea are all “familiar faces” among the top, they just switched places a bit. The only new addition is Tajikistan which with its 10.60% placed 5th, squeezing out Iran.

Speaking of Iran, it is truly a mystery. From the third-worst result last year, against all odds it showed the third-best one this time, conceding the first two places only to Somalia (3.26%) and China (2.20%), which both managed to retain their positions from 2023. Bolivia (4.82%) and Laos (4.29%) round up the top 5 countries with the best ad tracking climate. Cambodia, Georgia, and Iraq, which used to be among the best, while still scoring well below average, have gained some percentage points and are forced to settle for a position in the top 10.

Biggest trends

As this is the third time we’re doing this report, we wondered, what are the most noteworthy trends when you take into account the data points across all three? We checked which countries have gained and lost the most ad trackers between February 2023 and December 2024. Coincidence or not, but the countries that currently have the most trackers, are the same ones that have gained the most over the last two years. Uzbekistan is ahead of the pack yet again, having gained over 5 percentage points. Cuba, India, and South Korea followed suit, all having shown the increase in their respective ad tracker shares for the second time in a row.

Unfortunately, on the winners’ side, there’s no such consistency. Very few countries have displayed a steady decrease in the amount of ad trackers year after year, Somalia being the prime example. Puerto Rico and Bolivia, after a sizable improvement a year ago, managed to just barely retain their numbers this time. Once again, Iran is more of an exception and an oddity than anything else, and shouldn’t be treated as an indicator of any kind.

Conclusion

To collect the data, we used AdGuard DNS, our DNS service with over 100 million users and 270 billion queries per day.

The data also tells us that people are moving further away from unencrypted DNS. The overwhelming majority chose either DNS-over-TLS (93%) or DNS-over-HTTPS (4%). Only 3% of all users were satisfied by unencrypted plain DNS. The respective number back in December 2024 was 13%, and in February 2024 — 6.6%. We see clear indication that people value their online privacy and don’t want to give it up for free. It is intriguing to see if this share will drop even more by the next year.