We Took Google Analytics Off Our Own Site. Google Says It Doesn't Rank on It.
Our page said no Google Analytics while Google Analytics was running on it. What we found taking it off, what Google says about ranking, and our small honest numbers.
- → Our own page said "No Google Analytics" while Google Analytics was running on it
- → What Google's own search liaison says about removing it and your ranking
- → Our small, honest search numbers, and the two things we lost by switching
- → The ten-minute check for your own site: read your sign, then read your wiring
Big Brother Was Us
In 1984, Orwell's novel, every home has a telescreen. It watches you, it can't be switched off, and the Party would like you to know it's for your own good. The famous line is that Big Brother is watching you.
For a while, Big Brother was watching the visitors to our website. Big Brother was us. And we'd forgotten we'd hired him.
Here's the embarrassing part. The page on our site that explains how our setup works said "No Google Analytics." Google Analytics was running on that page at the time. We didn't lie on purpose. We wrote down what we intended and never checked it against what was actually loading, which makes it a very small Ministry of Truth with one part-time employee, and the employee was a webpage.
We found it during the swap, while we were taking the tool out. The swap made the page true. That's the whole story, and the rest of this post is what we learned taking the telescreen off the wall.
What Google Analytics Actually Does
If you run a small business website, there's a fair chance Google Analytics is on it, because whoever built the site added it and nobody has looked since.
Here's what it does in plain terms. Google's own documentation says its tags set a cookie in each visitor's browser to tell one visitor from another and one visit from the next, and the main one lasts two years by default. So the telescreen doesn't just count who walked in. It remembers you, it remembers you for two years, and what it collects goes to Google.
That's why the cookie banner exists. The banner is the consent form Big Brother hands you at the door: click here to agree to be remembered. Most people click it to make it go away, which isn't consent so much as a reflex.
We had the telescreen, we had the form, and we had a page that said we had neither.
What We Did
On July 15 we took Google Analytics off ingeniumvector.com and replaced it with a small open-source counter that runs on our own server. It counts visits. It sets no cookies. It doesn't know who you are and can't follow you to any other site. A doorman who counts heads and forgets faces.
The consent banner came down, because there was nothing left to consent to. The privacy and cookie pages were rewritten to say what's true, and our cookie policy now lists the only cookies we keep: the essential ones the site needs to work, including one from the security layer that keeps the bad traffic out. So it's no tracking cookies, not no cookies. There's still a lock on the door. There's just nobody at the window taking notes.
We also took Microsoft Clarity out of our disclosures. It had been listed as running on the site. It never actually loaded. We'd declared a second telescreen that was never on the wall, which is the opposite mistake and somehow the same mistake.
Does Google Punish You for Turning Off the Telescreen?
This is the question every business owner asks first, and it's a fair one. Google runs the analytics. Google also runs the search results. If you stop using one, does the other notice?
Google's answer is no. Danny Sullivan, Google's public liaison for search, has said Google doesn't use Google Analytics data as a ranking signal. Search Engine Roundtable reported it in January 2024 and noted that Google has said the same thing repeatedly over the years. I'm paraphrasing rather than quoting, because his original post is hard to reach now and the reporting is the record that survives.
So Google isn't checking whether your telescreen is on. It ranks you on your pages, not on whether you let it watch them being read.
Our Numbers, Which Are Small
This is where a lot of posts like this would show you a chart with a line going up and to the right. I'm not going to, because our line is short and close to the floor, and dressing it up in a post about a false claim would be a special kind of stupid.
Google's Search Console is Google's own report on how often our pages appear in its results. Google calls each appearance an impression, and it counts them whether or not anyone clicks. For July 1 through September 20, with five days in early August missing because the report never came in, it says this:
- In the two weeks before the switch, our pages showed up in Google results about 51 times a day.
- In the two weeks after, about 65 times a day.
- Across the rest of the window, about 49.
- Total clicks from Google across all 77 days of data: 9.
Nine. Winston Smith's diary had a bigger readership.
What does that prove? Nothing, either way. Two weeks of before-data and nine clicks can't show an effect if there was one. What it's consistent with is no harm, which is what Google said to expect. I'm telling you the site is small because it is, and because two plus two is four.
What We Lost
Two things, and I'd rather you hear them from me.
First, Google Analytics had started sorting visitors who arrive from AI assistants like ChatGPT into their own bucket. Our doorman can't do that. He counts heads. So when we wanted to write about AI-assistant traffic, we had to use a client's numbers instead of our own. That post is next.
Second, the counter has fewer reports than Google Analytics. If you open the deeper ones, you'll miss them.
For a site like ours, which mostly needs to know that a page was read, not who read it, those are trades I'd make again. Your site may need more than that, and that's a real reason to keep the telescreen. Just know it's there.
Our client sites keep Google Analytics unless there's a reason to change it.
Read Your Own Sign
The lesson isn't "remove Google Analytics." Plenty of businesses have good reasons to keep it, and Google says it isn't looking at it either way.
The lesson is the sign. Our page said one thing. The wiring said another. Nobody checked for a long time, and the sign was wrong in the direction that made us look better, which is the direction signs usually go wrong.
So here's the ten-minute version for your own site. Open your privacy page and read what it says you collect. Then ask whoever built your site one question: what actually loads when someone visits? If the two answers don't match, you've either got a telescreen you forgot about or a form nobody needs to sign. Either way, fix the sign first. The sign is the promise, and the wiring is the thing your visitors actually get.
We've written before about what search engines see when they look at you and about whether AI even knows your business exists. Both start where this one does, at the gap between what you say about yourself and what a machine can verify. And how we check whether AI engines cite us is the same doorman, counting heads in a different building.
Who's watching the visitors on your website right now, and did you hire him on purpose?
Smatthew Cohen is an AI Operator and the founder of Ingenium Vector. Before that he ran a sales firm called Tortoise & Rooster for twelve years, helping boutique manufacturers who couldn't afford the agencies that were ignoring them anyway. He builds things now.