Companies Using Google Optimize

I expected Google Optimize to be a ghost in our October 2026 crawl, three years after Google switched it off. It's still on 19,968 live domains. A domain counts when its pages load optimize.js from googleoptimize.com or create the google_optimize object, and today the first test does all the work. 10,495 of those domains match a company. Together they still rank Optimize 5th of 33 in A/B Testing & Experimentation, a place it holds because removing a tag takes someone's time and nothing on the page breaks if nobody does.

What the file does now

Google's notice says Optimize and Optimize 360 are no longer available as of 30 September 2023 and that experiments still running that day ended. So I checked what the tag does in practice. We opened 56 random Optimize domains in a headless browser. 45 fetched optimize.js, and Google answered every request with HTTP 200 and a file of 243 to 334 KB, about 89 to 116 KB compressed. The file is a Tag Manager container. In the five we downloaded, the Optimize tags are marked paused or the tag list is empty, and none of the 45 pages created the google_optimize object. The other 11 domains were bot walls, timeouts, dead hosts or sites that had already taken it out.

Six of the 45 also keep Google's anti-flicker snippet, which hides the whole page behind an async-hide class until the container loads. Because the file still arrives, the hide still ends early: we timed it at roughly 0.4 to 1.3 seconds on three sites. One Bulgarian shop left Google's placeholder ID, CONTAINER_ID, in the snippet. Nothing ever clears it, so the page stays blank for the full four-second timeout.

"Google turned Optimize off in 2023, but the script address never stopped answering. Every page that kept the tag still downloads a container with its tests switched off." - Sophie Clarke, Product Marketing Manager at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a site still loading optimize.js hasn't audited its tags since at least 2023. A CRO agency or testing vendor can confirm that in a browser in under a minute, which makes it a cheap, specific opener.

Removals are the trend

The chart reads 17,530 in June 2026, 19,237 in July, 19,767 in August, 21,477 in September and 19,968 in October. The rises can't be new users. They come from our side: the domains we crawl turn over every month, with dead sites dropping out and newly found ones added, and our detection widens over time. The removals are real. 5,106 domains dropped Optimize between 16 March and our October crawl, and only 513 of those still load it on another hostname.

Sales signal: treat this as a shrinking pool of about 20,000 domains. The sites still carrying the tag in late 2026 are often the least maintained, so qualify them on whether anyone still edits the site before you spend time on them.

Who still carries it

48.95% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and 29.48% have 11 to 50. Founding years peak in the 2010s (45.38%). That fits sites built while Optimize was free and a click away inside Google's tools. The enterprise tail is real but narrow: 280 companies have more than 1,000 staff, and their tag often sits on a side property. Farmers Insurance has it on its agent finder, Staples on directmail.staples.com, Equinix on its investor site, the NFL on playfootball.nfl.com. Tyson Foods, Steelcase and LCBO load it on their main sites.

Sales signal: at a large account, the owner of that side property is your contact, not the central web team. At a small one, it's the founder or the agency that built the site.

Where the tags sit

The United States has 3,648 matched companies, India 818, the United Kingdom 774, Brazil 539 and Canada 515. No industry passes Retail's 5.31%. Two shared setups stand out in the container IDs. Graphy, an online-course platform, loads one Optimize container on 196 of the 4,774 domains where we recorded the ID; the three course sites we opened, pacelab.in, selfupgrad.com and courses.callishailee.com, all run on Graphy. eReleases, a press-release service, accounts for 115 domains with one identical page title, aliases such as mypr.com that redirect to ereleases.com. Neither is more than about 4% of what we can see, and the rest is spread thin: 4,774 domains carry 3,425 container IDs.

Sales signal: dedupe by container ID before you count accounts. For a platform like Graphy, one conversation covers every creator site that carries its container.

Replacements without the clean-up

Google's notice pointed users to AB Tasty, Optimizely and VWO, which it integrated with Google Analytics. Our crawl shows many sites made that move and kept the old tag. 1,097 domains run VWO and the Optimize snippet together today, out of 1,416 we've seen with both since tracking began. For Optimizely it's 570 of 670, and for AB Tasty 72 of 89. Three in four or more of every pair are still in place, so this isn't switching in the usual sense. It's a new tool installed beside a dead one.

"More than a thousand sites run VWO and still load a Google Optimize tag that hasn't run a test since 2023. Nobody removed it because nothing broke." - Sophie Clarke, Product Marketing Manager at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: at most 1,739 Optimize domains run one of Google's three suggested replacements, under a tenth of the 19,968. The rest show none of them, which makes them the open field for any testing vendor. For VWO, Optimizely and AB Tasty account teams, a customer domain still loading optimize.js is a tidy-up worth raising at renewal.

The stack around it

The base here is the 20,539 live Optimize domains left after removing for-sale and gambling pages. Google Analytics runs on 92.34%. Google Tag Manager reads 99.41%, and part of that is Optimize itself: optimize.js is now built on Tag Manager and registers its container in window.google_tag_manager, the object our Tag Manager rule checks, as it did on four of the five pages I inspected. Microsoft Clarity runs on 23.53% and Hotjar on 17.8%. WordPress is on 34.08%, Elementor on 10.88% and Webflow on 3.13%. Consent managers are thin: OneTrust 4.98%, CookieYes 4.05%, Cookiebot 3.99%.

Sales signal: a free recorder on nearly a quarter of these sites and Hotjar on about a sixth say the interest in visitor behaviour didn't end with Optimize. Pitch testing to the Clarity and Hotjar sites first.

Key takeaways

1. 19,968 live domains still load a product Google shut on 30 September 2023, enough for 5th of 33 in A/B testing.

2. The file still downloads, about 89 to 116 KB compressed, and runs nothing. Six of 45 pages also hide their content until it arrives.

3. 5,106 domains have removed it since March 2026, so the pool is shrinking.

4. The sites are small and 2010s-founded: 48.95% of matched companies have 1 to 10 staff.

5. 1,097 domains run VWO beside the dead tag, 570 Optimizely and 72 AB Tasty.

How to use this list

Filter by company size and country, then check the site yourself: if optimize.js still loads, the tag audit is your opener. For the full list of 19,968 Google Optimize domains with company, size and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io. Our GA4 migration analysis found the same pattern with Universal Analytics tags that Google also retired in 2023.