Download websites that use Chitika

An advertising tag is one of the few technologies that keeps being detected long after it stops doing anything. Ad code gets pasted into a template once and then nobody removes it, because removing it changes nothing a visitor can see. Chitika is worth understanding through that lens before any other.

Chitika was an advertising network operated by Chitika Inc., a Proprietary platform dating to 2003 that served contextual display units for publishers and affiliate sites. The network stopped operating years ago and its tags no longer fill. What our crawler matches today is leftover markup in page templates rather than a live advertising relationship, so the honest description of this population is a record of where the code was pasted, not of where anybody still earns.

As of October 2026 the tag still appears on 218 sites. Dead tags make a surprisingly good instrument, which is the part most people miss. A page carrying advertising code from a network that no longer pays is a page whose template has not been edited since the network was alive, so the fingerprint doubles as a dating tool for the site around it. Sites in this group skew toward long running blogs, affiliate directories, forums and parked archives built when contextual advertising was the obvious way to monetise search traffic.

Several kinds of researcher want that list. Domain investors and content buyers use defunct monetisation code to find sites with traffic and no owner attention, which is the classic acquisition target. Security teams use the same signal in reverse, because abandoned templates are where stale third party scripts and lapsed domains inside script tags turn into supply chain risk. Historians of the advertising industry, and there are more of them than you would expect, use population counts across releases to watch a network decay after its shutdown rather than at the moment of it.

A lookup on one domain tells you that a single page still carries the code. The export answers the questions that only exist at population scale: how many sites still carry it, which country domains they sit on, and how quickly the count declines from one release to the next, which amounts to a measurement of how fast the web cleans up after a vendor disappears. The number is a floor in any case, since code sitting on pages our crawl does not reach, or inside a template rendered only on some paths, will not be seen at all.