Site Behavior Lab

Baseline visit Older format: some facts reconstructed, descriptive only

www.theguardian.com

Requested addresshttps://www.theguardian.com/

Oct 19, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

complete; derived from status and warnings

What this actually means

theguardian.com recorded 546 fewer third-party requests in the visit configured for Brave-list blocking.

The visit with no blocking made 669 requests; the visit configured to apply Brave's ad-block engine and default Shields filter lists (a simulation in this scanner's browser, not a live Brave-browser visit) recorded 546 fewer third-party requests. The blocker directly stopped 25 requests; the remaining difference may include follow-on requests that never started once their sources were blocked, plus run-to-run variance.

21tracking-service entities
640cross-site requests
154third-party cookie records

Plain-Language Findings

What this visit means

Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary
playwright-chromium

Review-worthy

Bottom line: this visit has review-worthy signals

The scan observed signals a non-expert should not have to decode from raw request tables.

The cards below translate the evidence into plain language. Where a measured distribution exists, severity ranks this visit against percentiles from this report's cohort, with each percentile card naming its metric-specific measured-site denominator; otherwise it uses fixed reference thresholds. That cohort is drawn from a curated set of popular, mostly commercial sites, not a random sample of the web. The request log, domain table, and methodology remain below for verification.

669 requests observed in one controlled visit.

Worth checking

324 requests matched Brave Shields filter lists

324 requests matched the default filter lists of Brave Shields, the ad and tracker blocker built into the Brave browser, while loading normally.

Computed with Brave's own ad-block engine and default filter lists in classification mode: matched requests were not blocked by the scanner and remain in this report's observed request counts. Matching shows what Shields would target on this visit's traffic; an actual Shields visit blocks these and also prevents their follow-on requests, so this number is neither a measured block count nor the total effect.

The hand-curated service catalog separately matched 239 request rows in this visit.Show matched requests

Not flagged

Lower values observed across comparable metrics in the Brave-list blocking attempt

The blocking visit ran with the scanner configured to apply Brave's ad-block engine and default Shields filter lists. It was a simulation in this scanner's browser, not a live Brave-browser visit, and application was not verified. Compared with the unblocked visit, it showed 546 fewer third-party requests, 154 fewer third-party cookies and 239 fewer tracking-related service requests.

Services only seen in the unblocked visit: PubMatic, Google and Magnite, plus 18 others. The blocking visit's engine directly blocked 25 requests; the remaining difference may include follow-on requests that never started once their sources were blocked. A single paired comparison can also reflect run-to-run variance (ad rotation, caching, experiments), so treat this as an observed difference, not a measured blocking rate.

Signed per-metric differences between the two visits; nothing is summed across metrics.Show matched requests

Review-worthy

Catalogued service domains recorded responses during this visit

PubMatic, Google and Magnite, plus 18 others appeared in the request log.

A catalog match identifies a maintainer-reviewed service/domain mapping; it does not establish why an individual request occurred, what it carried, or whether profiling happened. Functional catalog labels include advertising / supply-side platform, advertising and advertising / demand-side platform. This scan could not identify 84 of the 117 third-party hosts recorded here, so it cannot say who operates them. That is a limit of identity coverage, not evidence about the site.

640 cross-site requests across 117 third-party hosts.At or above the 90th-percentile mark for third-party domains across the 90 sites measured for this metric. High distinct tracking-service entities count (at or above the 12 reference threshold).Show third-party requests

Context

Requests were dispatched to catalogued major-platform domains

This visit dispatched requests to catalogued domains for Google and LinkedIn.

The domain matches identify services, not the requests' purpose, payload, or whether any profile linking occurred.

39 requests to these platforms.Show catalog-matched requests

Not flagged

No Google Analytics observed

This visit did not contact Google Analytics.

Neither Google Analytics nor its remarketing sync was observed in this visit.

No google-analytics.com or googletagmanager.com requests.Show catalog-matched requests

Review-worthy

Third-party cookies were present

154 third-party cookies showed up during the visit.

The scanner observed cookie metadata whose domain crossed the scanned site's registrable-domain boundary. This report does not retain cookie values or partition keys, so it does not establish whether a cookie was a persistent identifier or could recognize a visitor across sites.

176 cookies total in this report.At or above the 90th-percentile mark for third-party cookies across the 90 sites measured for this metric.

Context

Input-monitoring signal involving a third-party script

Listener coverage that could observe typing-related input events was registered through call chains that included a third-party script.

This is a behavioral instrumentation signal from listener registration, stack-attributed script origins, and known-vendor requests: it shows the page was instrumented to observe interaction, not that anything was transmitted. Stack attribution records the script origins present in the bounded registration call chain. A cross-site origin in that chain does not by itself establish that the cross-site script registered the listener. That is because first-party code can register its own listeners through a helper served from elsewhere. A different registrable domain is also not by itself a different operator: sites commonly serve their own scripts from a separate asset domain. The card therefore says third party only when the catalog or reviewed ownership attributes an origin to another organization. On scanners that run the active keystroke-capture probe, actual transmission is tested separately (a synthetic value is typed, never real input, and no typed values are collected). Treat this card as a review prompt rather than proof.

Session-recording listener coverage: 47 interaction-listener registrations with https://assets.guim.co.uk/, https://cdn.brandmetrics.com/ and https://cdn.permutive.app/, plus 2 others in the registration call chain. Input-monitoring listener coverage: 14 input-listener registrations with https://assets.guim.co.uk/, https://cdn.brandmetrics.com/ and https://*.*.doubleclick.net/ in the registration call chain.

Not flagged

No fingerprint-like API calls observed

The scan did not observe the instrumented high-entropy browser APIs.

This is an observation layer, not proof that fingerprinting is impossible.

0 API families recorded.

Raw evidence

Open the interactive evidence explorer

The findings above are built from the stored report. Load the request rows, domains, cookies, storage keys, browser signals, visit phases, charts and CSV export when you want to check them; the versioned report JSON is always available below without this interface.

This versioned report is currently retained in the public corpus. Follow the currently retained site history, repeat the same public route when it is available, or request a transparent evidence correction.

Report ID
20261019-24cbaa6b27db29dffee0cadfe367fc11
Site
www.theguardian.com
Latest visit
Schema
v1 schema · facts legacy-derived · descriptive report
Verify recorded provenance

Baseline visit

Started
Run quality
complete; derived from status and warnings
Scanner
playwright-chromium
Browser
153.0.8010.12
Redaction
not recorded by this schema
Provenance
Exact build and instrument digests were not recorded by this legacy schema.

Variant visit

Started
Run quality
complete; derived from status and warnings
Scanner
playwright-chromium
Browser
153.0.8010.12
Redaction
not recorded by this schema
Provenance
Exact build and instrument digests were not recorded by this legacy schema.

Recorded provenance is self-reported measurement metadata, not a cryptographic attestation. The public versioned report JSON contains the retained public evidence; see the methodology for interpretation and retention limits.

This report covers what the scanner measures, not everything a site can do. 17 browser surfaces are not instrumented at all (Every page except the one that was scanned; Anything that only loads after scrolling or interaction; Why a request happened, as a causal chain; and 14 others), 3 capabilities are declined by policy, and 3 are outside what any single visit can see. Their absence from this report is not evidence that they did not occur. Read the published coverage boundary.

Detector accuracy is unmeasured. No calibration study currently publishes a precision or recall for the detectors on this page, so a detector match here is a recorded observation, not a calibrated classification. How detector accuracy is measured.

Severity percentiles come from this report's exact schema, methodology, tracker-catalog, ServiceRole-taxonomy, metric-contract, producer, and Global Privacy Control cohort. Each percentile card's measured sites are among 99 sites with a successful load across all cohorts. Other methodologies, request-capped visits, and post-choice consent visits are excluded from each card's denominator, while failed or block-page attempts are outside that coverage.

Approved use boundary: This report is investigative evidence that requires independent corroboration. It is not a standalone legal determination and not the sole exhibit in a legal proceeding. Recorded in this project's release manifest on .