Google is known for innovation—and also, occasionally, for how it quietly bundles technologies behind the scenes. If you’ve ever tried to untangle what’s really being loaded on your website through Google Tag Manager (GTM), you’ve likely noticed it’s not always what it seems.
Is Google Sending Unexpected Traffic Through Your Google Tag Manager Instance?
Would you be surprised to learn that Google is sending traffic from your web pages through the googletagmanager.com domain for:
- Google Ads Conversion Tracking
- Google Tag
- Floodlight Counter & DoubleClick
- Google Universal Analytics
Many organizations rely on Google Tag Manager to efficiently deploy tags across their websites. But what often goes unnoticed is that GTM doesn’t just load the tags you tell it to load. It frequently serves additional Google technologies. Instead, they’re often served through the same googletagmanager.com domain, making them appear as part of GTM itself. This approach likely helps these technologies evade detection by ad blockers and other filtering tools, further obscuring what’s actually running on your site.
Why are these Google technologies using the Google Tag Manager domain? Is this because they want to bypass your Content Security Policies? Is your website acting as a conduit for these Google technologies? Or are you, the site owner, trying to hide Google tags inside GTM, yourself?
Our Response: Transparent Classification for Greater Control
ObservePoint’s March 2025 release launched a significant change: We now discretely report each of the technologies listed above, even if it routes its data through Google Tag Manager’s domains.
We’re also extending this effort to other Google tags (like Google Tag and DoubleClick), which also tend to sneak in extra tech during load. These will undergo similar reclassification in future updates.
Why This Matters
This hidden loading behavior has serious implications for any company managing a website today:
- Undisclosed Ad Traffic
Organizations may unknowingly have Google Ads, Floodlight, or other marketing technologies firing on their sites—even if they never intentionally added them—because these tools are routed through GTM’s domain in a way that conceals their presence. As a result, superficial checks that only scan for domains like googletagmanager.com can easily miss this hidden tracking. What seems like a simple tag container may actually be a bundle of undisclosed advertising and analytics technologies, operating stealthily beneath the surface. - Privacy and Compliance Risks
Undetected technologies increase risk for companies trying to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations. You can’t manage consent or disclosures if you don’t know the technologies are there. - Loss of Control
By blurring the lines between a tag manager and advertising technologies, Google reduces the transparency website owners have over what’s actually running on their sites. This makes governance, performance tuning, and privacy compliance much harder. - Erosion of Trust
For users and regulators alike, hidden technologies can appear deceptive. Even if unintentional, companies may be perceived as less trustworthy when they serve tracking technologies users weren’t clearly informed about.
When hidden technologies run without visibility, companies—not just Google—absorb the risk.
Who Should Care?
This update is especially important for:
- Data Analysts seeking more accurate site tag inventories and performance metrics.
- Privacy Officers managing compliance under regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
- Any organization using Google technologies and wanting more visibility into what’s truly happening on their site.
Final Thoughts
We respect the power of Google’s ecosystem—but obfuscation, whether intentional or accidental, creates risk. When one tag quietly loads five more, it’s not just a technical quirk—it’s a visibility gap. And that gap can mean the difference between compliance and exposure, between optimization and bloat. Whether Google is doing this to bypass blockers, or whether you, the site owner, are bundling tags to avoid scrutiny, the result is the same: a lack of transparency. At ObservePoint, we believe in surfacing every signal, no matter how well it’s tucked away. Because you can’t govern what you can’t see.
Ready to uncover how Google Tag Manager is really running on your site?
Start an audit with ObservePoint today
