Universal Analytics is gone. Is your site still measuring anything?

Updated June 2026 · sources: Google's own documentation

Here's a quietly expensive situation we find on a surprising number of business websites in 2026: the site still carries its old Google Analytics tag — the one starting with UA- — and nobody ever installed its replacement. The owner assumes traffic is being measured. It isn't, and it hasn't been for three years.

What happened, exactly

July 1, 2023 — standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data. Every hit sent to a UA- tag after this date went nowhere. (Google's notice)

July 1, 2024 — UA 360 (the paid tier) stopped too, and access to the UA interface and API ended for everyone.

mid-2024 — Google deleted the stored UA data permanently. There is no export, no recovery, no re-enable. The only path forward is Google Analytics 4.

Check your site in 60 seconds

The instant way: use our free analytics checker — paste your domain, get a verdict in 5 seconds.
The manual way: open your homepage, press Ctrl+U (view source), and search (Ctrl+F) for UA- and then G-. A UA- match with no G- tag = your analytics has been dead since July 2023. (If you find GTM-, tags load via Tag Manager — check inside your GTM workspace instead.)

Why this matters more than it seems

You're making decisions blind. Which products people look at, where visitors come from, whether that redesign helped — all unrecorded for three years.
Ad money leaks silently. If anything still points campaigns at UA-era conversion goals, nothing has been optimizing against real data since 2023.
The history is gone either way. The sooner GA4 starts collecting, the sooner you have a baseline again. Every month of delay is another month of missing data you can never backfill.

What "fixed properly" looks like

Not just pasting the GA4 snippet. A correct setup means: a GA4 property with the right data streams, key events (conversions) wired to what your business actually cares about — calls, form submits, orders, bookings — internal traffic filtered out, and a verification pass proving events arrive. That last part is where DIY setups usually stop short.

Analytics Rescue — €290 fixed, done in 2–3 days. GA4 installed correctly, your real conversions wired, verified live, and a short handover so you can read your own numbers. No subscription, no retainer.

Email us — free first look

More free checks: analytics checker · can your email be spoofed? · got Google's target API warning for your Android app? · all Vidra Labs services