Companies Using The Trade Desk

I'm Elif Arslan, CMO and co-founder of TechnologyChecker.io, and I turn technographic data into target lists for sales teams. This covers 73,250 domains running The Trade Desk as of our September 2026 crawl, 43,778 of them matched to a company record. Settle one thing first, because it changes every number below. The Trade Desk is a demand-side platform, so you might expect a detection to mean a publisher selling inventory. It doesn't. Of the 9,769 detected domains where we could see the script host, 7,553 loaded up_loader, the Universal Pixel an advertiser installs on its own pages. This is an advertiser install base.

Growth trajectory

Our records put The Trade Desk on 57,528 domains in June 2026, 71,373 in July, 70,732 in August and 73,250 in September. The June to July step isn't a sales quarter. It reflects changes on our side, both the domains we cover and the signals we detect the pixel with, and the crawled set turns over monthly as dead sites drop out and newly found ones come in. September is the month worth reading: of 5,432 new detections, only 512 were domains new to our crawl, so 4,920 were pixels appearing on sites we already visited.

"September added 5,432 detections and only 512 were sites new to us. The other 4,920 are advertisers putting a pixel on a site we already watched." - Elif Arslan, CMO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The list grows by tags appearing on domains we already know, so a monthly diff beats the running total. A first-time detection on a domain you track is a campaign launching, and that is when a media team buys tools.

Customer profile

The size table looks wrong for an enterprise platform. 42.51% of matched companies employ 1-10 people, 70.84% employ 50 or fewer, and only 2,143 (5.07%) have more than 1,000 staff. Look at what those small domains are: insurance agent sites, car dealer sites and franchise microsites, each carrying a parent brand's tag under the parent's contract. The age data agrees. 21.85% were founded before 1960 and 45.95% before 1990, across 18,373 companies with a founding year on record. The enterprise names sit in the company list, not the size table, and the host matters: Ford's detection is on www.warriorsinpink.ford.com, IBM's on developer.ibm.com, RTX's on careers.rtx.com.

Sales Signal: Two lists, two motions. The 1-10 employee domains are a volume play for agency tooling. The 398 companies above 10,000 staff justify named accounts, where the pixel usually sits with brand or recruitment marketing, not central IT.

Industry and geographic concentration

Insurance tops the table at 17.85%, and that needs a correction first. 6,949 of the 74,856 live domains, 9.3%, load State Farm corporate scripts or run on the Mirus agent platform: one advertiser's agent network, every agent on a separate domain with the corporate tag stack. Take the fleet out and Insurance still comes first at 10.51% against Retail's 8.5%, so the vertical is real. Roughly 3,000 of the insurance rows are one company's agents. Automotive is the second cohort: Motor Vehicle Manufacturing third at 4.47%, 4.63% of domains on Shift Digital Tag Manager, 1.5% on TradePending. Geography is blunter, the US on 37,560 of 43,128 matched companies, 87.09%, and the five English-speaking markets at 95.73%.

Sales Signal: Selling to agencies or local-media planners? The fleets are the densest list here. Selling to brands? Filter them out first, or your list becomes 3,000 State Farm agents who never chose the platform.

Why there is no migration table

This page ships without one, and the absence is the finding. We compared the ad stack of 19,468 domains that dropped the pixel against the domains that kept it. Every rival is commoner among the stayers. Microsoft Advertising runs on 27.81% of stayers against 11.6% of leavers; DoubleClick Floodlight 46.5% against 14.84%; Amazon Advertising 30.3% against 16.45%; Criteo 5.41% against 2.68%. Lift below one everywhere, which rules out a switching corridor. Ad pixels stack, and when one comes off the usual reason is the campaign ended. Same for the 22,192 domains that have dropped it since tracking began in March 2026: 44.2% of those rows were seen exactly once, a pixel up for a flight and down again. That is not 22,192 lost customers.

"Every competitor we tested is commoner among the advertisers who kept the pixel than among the ones who dropped it. That isn't a switching market, it's a campaign calendar." - Elif Arslan, CMO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: Don't pitch displacement. A dropped pixel is a finished flight. Watch the opposite trigger: a domain adding The Trade Desk next to an existing Floodlight or Amazon tag is buying measurement help now.

Technology ecosystem

97.93% of these domains run Google Tag Manager. Almost nothing in our data clusters that hard. It means the pixel is container-deployed rather than hard-coded, which is why it can appear and vanish on a campaign timetable. Google Analytics sits on 95.18%. The number I'd act on is Adobe Analytics at 25.54%, roughly four times what we see on a typical profile, with Ensighten at 20.6% behind it: a quarter of this base runs an enterprise measurement stack. Ecommerce is thin, Shopify at 4.39%, which fits advertisers rather than sellers.

Sales Signal: Tag Manager at 97.93% gives any tag-adjacent product, consent management, server-side tagging, tag governance, an entry point across the whole list. Qualify the Adobe Analytics quarter first.

G2 review signals

The praise is about targeting: advanced targeting and transparency at 31 mentions, ease of use 27, advanced audience targeting 25. The criticism is narrower than it looks, because four cons say one thing, steep learning curve (20), the same for new users (12), complex setup (10), difficult setup (10), 52 mentions in total. Put that beside the size split. Only 5.07% of these domains belong to companies over 1,000 staff. The reviewers describing a hard console describe a tool most of this footprint never opens: the agent and dealer sites carry a tag somebody else configured.

Sales Signal: Onboarding, training and managed-service offers belong with the 2,143 companies above 1,000 staff and the agencies around them. For the tail, sell the tag, not the console.

Key takeaways

1. An advertiser install base, not an inventory footprint. 7,553 of the 9,769 domains where we saw the script host loaded the Universal Pixel.
2. One fleet carries 9.3% of the footprint. State Farm agent sites and the Mirus platform account for 6,949 domains, moving Insurance from 17.85% to 10.51%.
3. The size table describes domains, not buyers. 5.07% above 1,000 staff on an enterprise-priced platform.
4. No switching story. Across 19,468 dropped domains every rival was commoner among the stayers, and 44.2% of the 22,192 dropped rows appeared once.
5. Tag Manager is the channel. 97.93% overlap, with Adobe Analytics at 25.54% marking the enterprise quarter.

Sales applications

Outreach template for media teams:

"Hi [Name], I saw [Company] added The Trade Desk's Universal Pixel to [domain] this month, next to your existing [Floodlight / Amazon] tags. We track 73,250 domains running it, and the ones stacking platforms this way hit the same reporting problem within a quarter. Worth fifteen minutes?"

Targeting strategy: On TechnologyChecker.io, filter the Trade Desk base to US companies of 201 employees or more that also run Adobe Analytics. That narrows 43,778 enriched companies to the segment with an in-house measurement team, and drops the fleets in one step.

Competitive angle: Skip displacement. These advertisers add rather than replace, so the opening is what a second platform creates: cross-platform reconciliation, creative versioning, incrementality nobody owns.

The full install base is filterable at TechnologyChecker.io, covering 73,250 domains running The Trade Desk and 43,778 enriched companies with industry, size, location and stack data.