Siteimprove

Overview

Siteimprove is a website quality and analytics platform used primarily by enterprise organisations, government agencies, universities, and public sector bodies. The platform combines web analytics with automated content quality scanning — checking for broken links, spelling errors, accessibility violations (WCAG compliance), and SEO issues across large, multi-author websites. Its analytics module tracks visitor behaviour in a manner similar to Google Analytics, while the quality scanning module crawls the site periodically from Siteimprove's own servers. Siteimprove is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, and stores data on EU-based infrastructure, which is a significant factor for public sector customers managing GDPR compliance.

What This Script Does

Siteimprove deploys a single JavaScript tracker on the website that handles both analytics data collection and in-browser quality monitoring signals.

Script loaded: siteimproveanalytics.com/js/siteanalyze_XXXXXXX.js — a property-specific analytics tracker loaded from Siteimprove's CDN domain. The filename contains the unique site identifier.

Cookies set:

• nmstat — First-party persistent cookie. Stores a pseudonymous visitor identifier used to distinguish unique visitors and track return visits across sessions. Set on the host domain. Expiry: 1 year.
• siteimproveses — First-party session cookie. Maintains the current session boundary to distinguish sessions from the same visitor. Expiry: session (30 minutes of inactivity).
• __hssc, __hstc (if HubSpot co-deployed) — Siteimprove occasionally appears alongside marketing platforms; these cookies are not Siteimprove's own.

Data collected per page view:

• Page URL and page title
• Referrer URL
• Time on page and scroll depth
• Click interactions on links and buttons
• Browser type, operating system, screen resolution
• IP address (used for geolocation; last octet is zeroed before storage in some configurations)
• Visitor identifier from the nmstat cookie for return visitor recognition

Accessibility and quality scanning: Siteimprove's server-side crawler periodically fetches website pages from Siteimprove's own IP ranges — this is a server-to-server operation and does not involve visitor cookies or personal data collection.

Dashboard reporting: Aggregated analytics data is available in Siteimprove's centralised dashboard for web teams managing content performance, accessibility compliance scores, and broken link inventories.

Consent & Compliance

Consent category: Analytics

The Siteimprove analytics tracker sets a persistent first-party identification cookie (nmstat) and collects individual visitor behaviour data including page views, navigation paths, and click events. This constitutes processing of personal data (pseudonymous identifiers + behavioural data) for analytics purposes.

Under GDPR Article 6 and the ePrivacy Directive, this type of non-essential analytics tracking requires freely given, specific, informed consent before the tracker is loaded. Siteimprove offers a "cookieless" or "privacy-safe" analytics mode in some configurations that reduces the data collection footprint, potentially qualifying for a legitimate interests basis in limited circumstances — but the default configuration requires consent.

Siteimprove is headquartered in Denmark and processes data on EU-based infrastructure. It offers a comprehensive DPA and GDPR compliance documentation. Data is not transferred to the US by default, which simplifies transfer mechanism requirements for EU customers.

Under CCPA/CPRA, analytics data collection including IP-based geolocation and browsing behaviour constitutes personal information. Organisations using Siteimprove should ensure a Data Processing Agreement is in place.

Should You Block This Without Consent?

Yes. Siteimprove's analytics tracker sets a persistent first-party identification cookie and collects individual visitor behaviour across sessions. Block the analytics tracker until the user explicitly consents to analytics cookies.