Next week marks the twentieth anniversary of Google Analytics. That is quite something to write.

Having been directly involved in its early journey — from introducing Google Analytics to Europe as Google’s Head of Web Analytics for EMEA, to helping hundreds of organisations make sense of their data since — I have witnessed how profoundly it reshaped the digital industry. In many ways, it defined it.

The Revolution that Changed Everything

When I wrote Google Analytics – Four Years On (in 2009), GA had already transformed web measurement. By removing the financial barrier, Google democratised analytics. Suddenly, every marketer, webmaster, and business owner — not just the enterprise few — could measure their online performance with a professional-grade tool.

It was a radical and generous move. But also a strategic one. By making GA free, Google rapidly built dominance in an industry that, although nascent, had been vibrant and competitive. By the time I reflected again after ten years in (2015), GA had become the de facto standard. The web analytics market was no longer a market; it was a 40M user ecosystem orbiting one product.

The Cost of Free

That monopoly came at a price. The explosion of free Google Analytics killed off many competitors. Innovation slowed, diversity of thought narrowed, and measurement culture became overly reliant on one company’s roadmap and data model.

At the same time, the industry’s understanding of what “data-driven” really meant became blurred. We had unprecedented visibility into user behaviour — but often at the expense of user consent and privacy.

The trade-off between insight and intrusion became the new fault line in digital measurement. Google had built a surveillance economy.

A Turning Point

Fast-forward to today, and the landscape has shifted again. The retirement of Universal Analytics and the forced migration to GA4 have been painful for many. But in hindsight, that disruption has also been healthy. It has prompted teams to re-evaluate what they actually need from analytics — and what they are comfortable collecting.

For the first time in more than a decade, we are seeing meaningful alternatives emerge. Yet, unlike the early “GA lookalikes” that essentially emulated Google Analytics under a different badge, the new generation of tools is being built with fundamentally different values: privacy, transparency, and user trust.

These are not fringe concerns anymore; they are becoming central to how organisations think about data.

From Free to Fair

This philosophical shift matters. The old paradigm — data for free, but your users pay with privacy — is no longer tenable. Legislators, consumers, and even technologists are recognising that sustainable data practices must be fair as well as functional.

That change is already visible. Privacy-first analytics platforms are thriving. Server-side tracking, consent frameworks, and data governance are now part of everyday discussion. In short, analytics is growing up.*

*Enterprise examples include Piano Analytics and Piwik Pro (my personal preference) and at the other end of the scale: Plausible, Matomo and Ahrefs.

Looking Ahead

So as Google Analytics turns 20, perhaps this is less a celebration of one product and more a reflection on an entire generation of measurement thinking.

GA revolutionised analytics. It taught us the power of accessible data and inspired an industry to think in numbers. But its dominance also taught us the dangers of centralisation and complacency.

Despite the current hype, I think the next 20 years will not be about who owns the biggest dataset or the most advanced machine learning model. They will be about who earns the most trust — from users, from regulators, and from the organisations they serve.

That, I believe, is the true legacy of Google Analytics: not just how it changed the industry, but how it has forced us to rethink what responsible measurement should look like.

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Brian Clifton is a measurement and data privacy strategist, author, and founder of Verified Data — the auditing platform for data quality and governance. Formerly Google’s Head of Web Analytics for EMEA, Brian has spent over two decades helping organisations build trust in their digital data. He is the author of the best-selling books Successful Analytics and the series Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.