Companies Using Google Hosted Libraries

I run the crawler side of TechnologyChecker.io, so I read a Google Hosted Libraries detection as a single line of HTML: a script or stylesheet tag pointing at ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/. As of our October 2026 crawl, 1,656,543 domains carry one, and 887,999 of the 1,631,203 in our clean live set match a company record, a 54.4% match rate. Google lists no price and requires no account, so everything below counts websites. What matters to a sales team is what that line says about the site (our post on technology detection methods covers how signals like this are matched).

What the signal catches

The rule fires on a script loaded from the /ajax/libs/ path or a stylesheet linked there. A preconnect hint to the host isn't enough. Google's Hosted Libraries page lists 23 libraries, three.js and Shaka Player among them, served with CORS headers and a one-year cache. Two of them do nearly all the work. We logged one example file path per domain from the host over the last 45 days, 4,996 domains in all: 3,713 (74.32%) fetched jQuery and 1,146 (22.94%) Google's Web Font Loader. jQuery UI came to 87 and AngularJS to 23.

The Web Font Loader share has one main source. On the Webflow sites I opened (Lear's homepage, Adobe's certified-professional site, Laureate's 2025 report, Lyft's ads site), jQuery came from Webflow's own host and only webfont.js 1.6.26 from Google. That's how Webflow reaches 12.12% of this base.

Sales Signal: Separate the two populations before you pitch. Filter Webflow out and what's left are sites whose developers or theme put Google's jQuery on the page, which is where front-end maintenance work lives.

Growth trajectory

Our current crawl window reads 1,365,169 domains in June 2026, 1,568,753 in July, 1,590,708 in August, 1,637,913 in September and 1,656,543 in October. The June to July step of 203,584 came from our side. Counts are not a like-for-like series over time: the set of domains we crawl turns over every month, with dead sites dropping out and newly found ones added, and our detection signals widen over time. Since July the gains have been 21,955, 47,205 and 18,630 a month, which is close to flat at this size.

Exits run alongside. 235,570 domains have stopped loading it on at least one hostname since we began tracking it in March 2026. That count starts in March, so it isn't a lifetime total, and it overstates real exits: when I re-ran the count in October, 28,556 of 235,683 such domains still loaded it on another hostname.

"Google Hosted Libraries barely gains or loses sites from one month to the next. The files on it get older. A site still pulling jQuery 1.x from Google in 2026 hasn't had a front-end decision made in years." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: Treat this as a mature installed base and size territories on the October count. A first detection usually means our crawl reached the domain for the first time, so don't send "just adopted" outreach from it.

The versions are the signal

Google's list stops at jQuery 3.7.1. When I requested 4.0.0 from ajax.googleapis.com on 13 October it returned a 404, while jQuery's download page offers 4.0.0. The sites on this CDN are further back still. 3,664 jQuery loads in our sample carried a version, and 2,629 (71.75%) pinned a release older than 3.5.0, the April 2020 version whose main change was a security fix for a cross-site scripting issue in 3.4.1 and earlier. 1,664 (45.41%) were on jQuery 1.x. Our jQuery CDN profile found 49.11% of 4,044 sites below 3.5.0, so the copies sites load from Google run older.

The named list shows it. Chicago Public Schools' STEM site loads jQuery 1.6.4 and jQuery UI 1.8.16, CIBC's branch locator 1.7.2, the University of California Academic Senate 1.7.1, Emirates' mobile booking site 1.10.2, and Boston Scientific's investor pages 1.9.1 next to 3.2.1.

Sales Signal: For security scanners, front-end agencies and managed hosts this is a trigger list you can check before the first email, because the version sits in the URL.

The companies behind the domains

The matched base is small and settled. 64.42% of companies with a size band have 1 to 10 employees, more than on our cdnjs (58.17%), jQuery CDN (58.04%), Unpkg (56.64%) or jsDelivr (56.35%) profiles. It's the most American of the five, too: 34.37% of matched companies are in the United States, against 25% to 28% on the other four. 37.73% of those with a founding year date from the 2010s and only 17.01% from the 2020s.

The enterprise tail is 8,997 companies above 1,000 staff, and they rarely load Google's copy on the main site. 35 of the 50 in our named list were detected on a subdomain: investor pages at Boston Scientific, NatWest Group and Sysco, careers sites at Aon and Groupama Gan, John Deere's configurator, ANZ's help centre. Wipro, Mondelez International, TaskUs and Centene load it on their main sites.

Sales Signal: At a large company the hit belongs to whoever runs that surface, often an investor-relations or careers platform vendor. Ask who built the page before you pitch the central web team.

Industry and geography

No sector stands out. Retail leads at 4.88%, then Construction (3.76%), Real Estate (3.46%) and IT Services (2.77%), and the ten charted industries add up to only 29.15%. Construction, Real Estate and Medical Practices together hold 9.62%, which is a lot of local-service websites. The US, UK, Canada and Australia account for 52.25% of matched companies.

Sales Signal: For agencies selling rebuilds, the local-service verticals are the obvious cut, often businesses with a site someone else built, an old jQuery file in the head, and no in-house developer. Combine an industry filter with the version check above.

Why there's no migration table

We tested Google Hosted Libraries against cdnjs, jsDelivr, Unpkg, the jQuery CDN and Microsoft's Ajax CDN, and no pair passed our switching tests. Each is mostly sites using both. 429,809 domains load Google's copies and cdnjs in our October crawl, out of 507,729 ever seen with both (84.7%). For jsDelivr it's 338,975 of 406,633 (83.4%), and for the jQuery CDN 126,780 of 156,252 (81.1%). A page can take jQuery from Google and a carousel from cdnjs, so there's no exclusive slot to switch out of. Library CDNs mostly lose a site when it's rebuilt or goes offline.

"Four in five domains that have ever loaded Google's copies alongside cdnjs still load both. These CDNs share pages far more often than they take them from each other." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: Don't build a "leaving Google's CDN" campaign from churn data. If you sell a CDN or a performance product, pitch consolidation instead: jsDelivr even runs a page for converting Google links. The prospects are the 429,809 sites already pulling files from two public CDNs on one page.

Technology ecosystem

Across 1,631,171 clean live domains, jQuery runs on 98.84%, jQuery Migrate on 21.02% and jQuery UI on 18.75%. Bootstrap is on 28.02% and Modernizr on 18.37%, a front-end generation that predates current build tools. WordPress (27.98%) is the largest platform, and 250,745 domains (15.37%) also run Shopify. GoDaddy hosting appears on 18.27%. Tailwind CSS reaches only 9.2%.

Sales Signal: Fewer than one site in ten runs Tailwind CSS, so most of this base hasn't been rebuilt recently. Front-end agencies and page-speed services have a dated codebase to point at.

What users say

A service with no sign-up has no G2 profile, so I read the search results instead. For ajax.googleapis.com they're full of "is it safe" questions and threads about pages stuck waiting on the host. Google's privacy statement covers the first: unauthenticated requests, cookies for security only, referrers stripped before logging. The second is fair, since every hit is a third-party request.

Sales Signal: Privacy vendors in EU markets can point to a Google host on every page, and performance tools to a third-party script in the head. Both show in the page source.

Key takeaways

1. 1,656,543 domains, 4th in CDN with 7.9%, third among library CDNs.
2. Flat since July: monthly gains under 50,000.
3. jQuery (74.32% of our path sample) and the Web Font Loader that Webflow pages use (22.94%) are almost all of it.
4. 71.75% of versioned jQuery loads predate 3.5.0, and Google doesn't host jQuery 4.
5. 64.42% of matched companies have 1 to 10 staff; 34.37% are in the US.

How to use this list

Targeting: filter Google Hosted Libraries, exclude Webflow, and add a company size of 11 to 200 employees to reach businesses with a site worth maintaining; the 11-50 and 51-200 bands hold 31.03% of matched companies. Then read the detection URL: a subdomain hit is usually one team's page.

A workable opener: "Your [page] loads jQuery [version] from Google's CDN, a release from before the 2020 security fix. Google doesn't host jQuery 4, so upgrading means changing where the file comes from as well. Here's how [product] handles both."

Build the filtered list from all 1,656,543 domains and 887,999 matched companies on TechnologyChecker.io.