How much traffic do ad blockers hide from your analytics?

Why nobody can give you one figure

The share of blocked visits depends on two things you control only partly:

• Your audience. People who install blockers are not spread evenly. Some browsers block trackers on their own, and some audiences install blockers far more than others.
• Your analytics tool. A blocker acts on a list. If your tool’s host or script name is on the list, it is blocked for every visitor using that list; if it is not, it is not blocked at all.

So a figure from someone else’s site tells you about their audience and their tool, not yours.

One measurement, and what it measured

Plausible ran its own proxied script beside Google Analytics (then Universal Analytics) on one site with a post trending on Hacker News and Reddit, over three days in late August 2021: Plausible recorded 50,947 visitors and Google Analytics 21,054, so Google missed about 58% of them (Plausible: 58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics). That was a technical audience at a peak, measured by an analytics vendor. The same study found higher blocking on desktop and in Firefox than overall (same post). Treat it as the top of the range for that kind of reader, not an average.

Which blockers block what

• EasyPrivacy is a filter list that aims to remove “all forms of tracking”, including tracking scripts (EasyList). Its rules name hosts and paths: the current EasyPrivacy list blocks google-analytics.com, googletagmanager.com, cloudflareinsights.com (Cloudflare’s beacon) and plausible.io when loaded from another site, and also the path /_vercel/insights/script.js wherever it is served.
• uBlock Origin turns EasyPrivacy on by default (uBlock Origin: default lists), and its wiki notes that most other blockers only enable EasyList, the ad list (uBlock Origin wiki: Filter lists).
• Brave builds its Shields from EasyList, EasyPrivacy, uBlock Origin’s lists and its own (Brave Shields).
• Cloudflare says its Web Analytics beacon is blocked by ad blockers (Cloudflare: Web Analytics FAQ).

Two lessons from the lists: a third-party analytics host is the easiest thing to block, and a well-known script path can be blocked even on your own domain.

How to measure your own gap

1. Get a server-side count. Your host’s request logs, Cloudflare’s zone analytics or Netlify’s log-based analytics count page loads without a script, so blockers do not affect them. Netlify says so of its own analytics (Netlify: How Web Analytics works).
2. Filter the bots out of it as well as you can: server counts include crawlers, which inflate the gap.
3. Compare page views to page views over the same days. The difference, minus remaining bots, is roughly what your script misses.
4. Test with a blocker yourself. Install uBlock Origin, open your site with the browser’s network panel, and see whether the analytics request is blocked.

How to lose less

• Serve the script from your own domain. A proxy on your site passes the script and its requests through a path like /stats/, so a host-based rule does not match. Pick a path that is not a well-known analytics name.
• Count the things that matter on the server. Signups and payments happen on your server anyway; record their source there, and a blocked script cannot lose them.
• Accept some loss. A visitor who blocks tracking has asked not to be tracked. Serving from your domain changes where the request goes, not what you collect, so still collect only what your privacy notice says.

With Nordva Launch

Launch can serve its script from your own domain through a small proxy on your server (Next.js, Cloudflare Workers or any server), so ad blockers that block analytics hosts do not drop those visits. A proxy key, available on every plan, stops anyone else posting visits as your proxy. Launch never stores the visitor’s IP address, through a proxy or not. Loaded directly from e.nordva.dev, the script matched no EasyPrivacy rule when we checked the list on 23 September 2026, but lists change, and the proxy is what does not depend on them. Start free.