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Filed under CDN, the entry looks like a delivery decision, the sort of thing a team weighs against latency and cost. Almost nobody weighed anything. The script reference was copied from an example somebody found while building the page, and at the time the example was right.

The service began in 2009, when linking a library from a shared public network was standard advice in every tutorial. The reasoning held at the time: a visitor arriving from another site would already have the file cached, so the page painted sooner and the origin server did less work. Browser vendors later partitioned that shared cache for privacy reasons and the cross site benefit disappeared. Package managers, bundlers and self hosted assets took over new projects, and the advice quietly reversed.

Presence today therefore works as a maintenance timestamp. A page still pointing its script tags at the service is usually a page whose front end has not been rebuilt since the practice fell out of fashion, or a page generated from a template written back then and never revised. As of September 2026 we still find 3,618,820 sites doing it, which is the useful part of the entry: the population is large enough to segment, and every row carries an implicit statement about how recently anyone looked at the code.

Several audiences buy exactly that implication. Agencies selling redesigns want sites that are demonstrably stale rather than sites that merely look dated to a human eye, because a technical marker survives an argument about taste. Privacy consultants want them because an external script origin is an external script origin, and pages built on the old advice usually carry several. Compliance teams in Europe have a sharper interest, since a request to a Google origin discloses a visitor's address to the operator before any consent banner has been answered, and regulators in more than one member state have taken a position on that pattern.

Our record marks the service as Freemium within the CDN group, which understates the arrangement. Nothing is charged and nothing is promised. Versioned URLs remain available and keep being served, so nothing breaks, and the absence of breakage is precisely why the install base decays so slowly. A dependency that quietly keeps working is a dependency nobody schedules time to remove.

United States accounts for 1,625,730 of the sites and .com is heavily represented, which tracks the age and language of the documentation that recommended the practice rather than any current regional pattern. Detection reads the script origin in delivered markup, so it is dependable when the tag sits in the HTML and blind when a tag manager or another script injects the reference at runtime. A count assembled that way is a floor, and the sites it misses are disproportionately the ones with heavier client side tooling.

For one hostname the question is trivial and a browser answers it in a keystroke. Across a market the exercise is different in kind: which sectors still carry legacy external script origins, how the share falls year over year, which platform and theme families keep the pattern alive long after their users stopped noticing, and which national markets still cluster around it. The file answers those with country, suffix, platform and the rest of the detected stack on the same row, which is what turns an old script tag into a segment somebody can actually work with.