Trackers ยท guide
What the grade means
A TagQuiet scan ends in one letter. The letter is built from two facts about each page: which third-party scripts load on it, and whether the page is one where a visitor books, gets in touch or fills in a form. Nothing else goes into it: not the site's design, not its speed, not how many trackers it has in total. A site with one Meta Pixel on its booking page grades F; a site with five analytics scripts on its home page grades B.
The two facts
Kind of script. Analytics counts visits: Google Analytics, a bare Tag Manager container, call tracking. Advertising or behavioural does something with the visitor: an ad pixel builds an audience or measures a conversion, a session recorder replays the visit. Thetracker pages say which is which, one script at a time.
Kind of page. A page is sensitive when its address says booking, appointment, scheduling, contact, consultation, intake, patient portal, new-patient forms, insurance verification or referral, or when the page carries a form. The address is the test, never the domain: a practice at a domain with "book" in it is not a booking site on every page.
The four grades
| Grade | Sites | Share | What it is made of |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 72 | 20% | Nothing third-party loads anywhere on the site, and no embedded third-party widget (a booking, chat, review or maps iframe) outside the allowlist. |
| B | 53 | 15% | Analytics-only scripts (Google Analytics, a Tag Manager container with no advertising tags inside it, call tracking), and only on pages that are not booking, contact or patient pages. Or: no tracker at all, but an embedded third-party widget whose own page we cannot see into. |
| C | 141 | 39% | Analytics on a booking, contact or patient page. Or an advertising or behavioural script somewhere on the site, but not on one of those pages. |
| F | 96 | 27% | An advertising or behavioural script (Meta Pixel, Google Ads, TikTok Pixel, LinkedIn Insight, Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, FullStory, Pinterest Tag and the like) on a booking, contact or patient page. |
Latest scan per practice across 362 dental and physical therapy sites, as of 2026-10-08. The same numbers, with the trackers behind them, are on thebenchmark.
What never lowers a grade
- Cloudflare Turnstile, the bot check on a form. It profiles nobody.
- Analytics the practice hosts itself, on its own domain or subdomain. The data stays with the site owner, which is the whole definition.
- The hosting platform's own assets: a Wix or Squarespace site serves its pages, images and fonts from the platform's network, and the practice cannot change that without leaving the platform.
Google reCAPTCHA is not on that list. It is also a bot check, but it is served by an advertising company and sets that company's cookies, so it counts as a tracker.
Moving between grades
- F to C is one change: take the advertising or behavioural script off the booking, contact and patient pages. On Tag Manager that is a trigger exception; on WordPress it is usually a plugin setting or a plugin deactivated. The script can stay on the rest of the site.
- C to B is the same move for analytics: keep it on the home and service pages, stop it on the booking and contact pages.
- B to A means no third-party script anywhere. Self-hosted analytics gets a practice there without losing visit counts.
What the grade does not see
The free scan reads public HTML and the Tag Manager container. It does not submit forms, log in, or see what loads inside an embedded booking widget, which is the vendor's page, not the practice's. A B grade on a site with a booking iframe means the practice's own pages are clean and the widget is unmeasured. The paid audit runs a real browser and records every request each page makes, which catches scripts added after load; its grade can be lower than the free scan's, never higher.
What we are not saying
The grade is a technical inventory. It does not say what any of it means for a particular practice's obligations. TagQuiet performs technical assessments and is not a law firm; that question is for your counsel, and counsel usually starts from an inventory of what actually loads.
Get your letter
The free scan grades your site in about ten minutes and lists every script by page, so you can see which fact produced the letter. No call follows unless you ask for one.