Google Analytics stopped working on 2,077 Belgian small business sites, and other digital fossils

In November 2026, 2,077 of the 21,973 Belgian small business homepages we could read still carried a Universal Analytics tag with no Google Analytics 4 and no Tag Manager beside it: 9.5 percent. That tag has recorded nothing since 1 July 2023. With Google+, Flash, the Facebook chat, Covid rules and a copyright year of 2023 or older, 18.4 percent carry at least one digital fossil.

A digital fossil, as we use the term, is something left on a website after the service behind it shut down, or a notice written for a time that has passed. Visitors rarely notice. Owners often do not either, and that is the point: a site can look fine while its analytics have been blind for three years and its footer says nobody has touched it since 2019. We counted on the same 21,973 sites as our study of legal requirements, so you can read both side by side by sector, province and platform. We publish counts only, never a name.

The short version

Most fossils come from one moment: the switch to GA4 in 2023. Everything else is rare. The footer year is the most visible sign, and it is the one a visitor sees first.

Of the 2,294 sites with a shut-down service or an old rule, 2,202 have exactly one. Only 92 have two or three. Every end date in this table comes from the page of Google, Adobe or Microsoft. Meta does not publish one for its chat plugin: its developer documentation simply no longer lists it among the website plugins. AddThis has no public end page either; its domain now forwards to Oracle and the host that served the share script no longer resolves.

Why your dashboard went quiet

If you opened your analytics recently and saw nothing, this is the likely reason. Google replaced Universal Analytics with Google Analytics 4. Standard properties stopped processing data on 1 July 2023, and from the week of 1 July 2024 the old reports, the interface and the API were switched off. The tag on the site kept running. Google still serves analytics.js: on 6 November 2026 the 52 kB file came back as normal. So every visitor's browser still downloads a script whose data goes nowhere.

Not every site with a UA tag is blind. We split them by what else sits in the HTML.

The 473 in the middle are the grey zone of this study. A Tag Manager container can load GA4 without leaving a trace in the page source, and we did not fetch containers. Those sites may well be measuring, so we left them out of the headline. The 2,077 have nothing else: Universal Analytics is the only measurement in the HTML.

This ties into what we found in October. In our snapshot of 586 Belgian business websites, 35.6 percent let an analytics or advertising service set a cookie or fire a pixel before the visitor chose anything. Part of that tracking now serves nobody. If you are rebuilding your setup, read what changed in Consent Mode first, so the new tag asks permission the right way.

The year in the footer

Of the 21,973 homepages, 11,119 show a copyright year in the HTML. Where a site shows a range, we took the last year, so '2015-2026' counts as 2026. The picture is mostly good: 69.9 percent show 2026. But 18.9 percent show 2023 or older and 9.9 percent show 2020 or older. That is 2,106 sites with 2023 or earlier, 1,103 of them with 2020 or earlier, and 220 stuck at 2015 or before.

One blind spot matters here. Many sites insert the year with a small script so it updates every January. We read pages without running JavaScript, so we do not see that year. We spotted such a script on 609 sites; on 367 of them no other year appeared. A footer year is a rough signal too: a well kept site can carry an old one by accident. Still, it is what a new customer checks when they wonder whether the business is still open.

In October we suggested checking the year in your footer: on 586 sites, 14.1 percent showed 2024 or earlier. On the full 21,973 that comes to 2,603 sites, or 11.8 percent of all homepages.

The two biggest fossils travel together. Among sites with a dead Universal Analytics tag that show a year, 35.6 percent show 2023 or older (895 sites). Among all other sites with a year, it is 17.4 percent (9,760 sites). That does not mean one causes the other. It does suggest both point to the same thing: nobody is working on the site.

Small fossils: Covid, Google+, Flash and Skype

The famous time capsules are rare. We searched in Dutch and French for strict phrases about measures, such as visits by appointment only because of the Covid rules or keeping a distance of one and a half metres in the shop, and never for product names. Every one of the 80 hits was read by hand. 39 still read as a rule in force, 14 were clearly dated news posts and 27 were about something else. Only the 39 count.

Google+ closed for consumers in April 2019. A visible link or button to it remained on 117 homepages, and on 42 more it lived only in a hidden meta tag. Adobe ended Flash on 31 December 2020 and has blocked Flash content since 12 January 2021; 20 sites still embed a Flash object. The Facebook chat plugin code sat on 79 sites, AddThis share buttons on 41 and Google Optimize on 10. Skype closed on 5 May 2025, and 5 sites still offer a Skype call button or link.

For a visitor, most of these are an icon that leads nowhere or an empty box. On a phone an empty box stands out more; see how small business sites behave on mobile.

Leftovers we did not count

Two kinds of old code show up a lot but usually come from a theme or platform, not from the owner. Code written only for Internet Explorer sits on 3,468 homepages, 15.8 percent. Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer 11 on 15 June 2022 and disabled it on 14 February 2023. A meta tag that blocks the old Skype toolbar appears on 1,529 sites, 7.0 percent, and almost all of them are on Wix: 1,427 of 1,442. Neither does harm. Both say something about the age of the template.

On WordPress or another platform, such code usually comes from a theme that has not been updated in years. Our CMS detector shows what your site runs on.

By sector: healthcare carries the most

A dead analytics tag is spread fairly evenly, between 6.8 and 11.1 percent per sector. The footer year separates them more. Healthcare sites with a year show 2023 or older on 23.5 percent, business services on 13.8 percent. Combined, healthcare reaches 21.3 percent with at least one fossil, business services 16.0 percent.

Healthcare also stood out in the legal requirements study, where 9.1 percent of healthcare sites named a professional body, a protected title or an INAMI/RIZIV number. A practice website tends to be built once and then left alone.

By province: Luxembourg and Liège ahead of Brussels

In the province of Luxembourg, 23.1 percent of small business sites carry at least one fossil, in Liège 22.4 percent. Brussels sits at 16.1 percent and East Flanders at 17.0 percent. The gap is mostly the footer year: in Luxembourg 30.4 percent of sites with a year show 2023 or older, in Hainaut 28.8 percent, in East Flanders 16.1 percent. Across Wallonia it is 24.3 percent, across Flanders 17.2 percent. For the dead analytics tag the provinces are close, from 6.9 percent in Brussels to 11.4 percent in West Flanders.

By platform: Shopify and Next.js almost clean

Platform makes a large difference, but the choice of platform also tracks the age of a site, so read this as a description and not a verdict. On Shopify 3.8 percent of sites carry a fossil, on sites built with Next.js 2.0 percent. On Joomla it is 31.2 percent and on Jimdo 32.7 percent. Wix shows the two fossils pulling apart: almost no dead analytics tags (0.2 percent), yet 38.8 percent of Wix sites with a year show 2023 or older. Custom builds and sites we could not identify are the reverse, with 15.0 percent dead tags and a footer year that is less often old.

If you are weighing a platform, start with Wix or WordPress, Joomla vs WordPress and custom website or WordPress. The CSV lists every platform with at least 30 sites.

What fossils say about upkeep

None of these breaks a website. A visitor can still call, read the opening hours and book. Together, though, they show how a small business site usually lives: it gets built, goes online and is only touched when something goes wrong. A shut-down service does not go wrong. It goes quiet. That is why the tag stays, and the year with it.

The same pattern runs through our other measurements. In October more than a third of sites had no meta description. On the same 21,973 sites as this study, only 34.0 percent showed their enterprise number on the homepage. And our page speed study shows what scripts that do nothing cost a page in loading time; our guide to improving website speed starts with removing them. A site with ongoing maintenance gets this cleaned up as a matter of routine. Without it, the steps below take a quarter of an hour.

Is your own site still measuring?

You can check your own site without technical knowledge.

1. Check that you are really measuring. Open your analytics account and look for a GA4 property with visitors from this week. If the only property starts with UA-, you have measured nothing since July 2023. Our GA4 setup guide walks through it step by step.
2. Remove the old tag. A UA tag next to GA4 does nothing. Have it removed, or move all your tags into Google Tag Manager so you manage them in one place.
3. Fix the year in your footer. Let a line of code update it each January, or drop the year.
4. Click every icon in your footer. Google+, Skype and the Facebook chat are gone. Keep only the channels you actually use.
5. Read your homepage like a new customer. A Covid notice, last year's holiday hours or a promotion that ended? Take it down.
6. See what your site loads. Our cookie scanner shows what runs before a visitor chooses, and whether you need a cookie banner.

If every step turns into a job of its own, a website redesign can cost less than patching. We build a new business website from 1,500 euros.