The UAE Website
Privacy Compliance Index
We scanned 547 UAE business websites on .ae domains to see what tracking loads before a visitor agrees to it, and whether they are asked at all. The results and the aggregate data are public.
Sample: 547 websites on .ae domains (71 online shops, 476 business websites). It is not a sample of UAE online stores, most of which use .com. Not a legal finding.
Denominator for all three cards: every website scanned. "No consent banner" means no banner was detected and at least one tracker, non-essential cookie or pre-consent tracking was.
What we scanned, and what the numbers do not say
- Websites were drawn from Common Crawl's public URL index, all on .ae domains: 71 online shops and 476 business websites.
- Homepage only, scanned once, client-side, in a real browser. Inner pages and server-side processing were not examined.
- 117 scans were inconclusive (the site blocked the scanner or gave no signal), leaving 430 scored. Data aggregated 2 October 2026.
- These are technical measurements, not a legal finding about any website. No website is named and no per-site data is published.
Median score 40/100
Of the 430 websites scored, 213 (50%) scored below 40 and 81 (19%) scored 80 or more. The mean is 45.
Median score by group
Counts are all websites scanned in the group; medians are of those scored. The Shopify group is small, so read it with care.
The most common analytics and advertising tags
256 websites (47%) linked no privacy policy from the homepage. CDNs and infrastructure scripts (Cloudflare, jsDelivr and similar) are left out of this list; the CSV has them.
The UAE PDPL, briefly
Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data has been in force since 2 January 2022. It has no provision written for cookies, but when a tracker can identify a visitor, what it collects is personal data, and processing personal data needs consent unless one of the law's exceptions applies. Its executive regulations had not been published on the UAE's official legislation portal as of September 2026.
Entities established in the two financial free zones fall under their own regimes instead: the DIFC Data Protection Law No. 5 of 2020 and the ADGM Data Protection Regulations 2021.
Three steps that close the most common gaps
- 1
Hold tracking until the visitor agrees
Keep analytics and advertising tags off by default, and run them only after the visitor chooses to accept.
- 2
Show a banner with a real reject option
Clear categories, a reject button as easy as accept, settings visitors can return to and withdraw consent, and a dated record of each choice.
- 3
Send a Consent Mode v2 signal
If you run Google Analytics or Tag Manager, set the default state to denied and update it once the visitor has chosen.
How many UAE websites load trackers before consent?
In the October 2026 edition, 287 of 547 UAE business websites on .ae domains (52%) loaded tracking before the visitor gave consent.
How many track visitors with no consent banner?
279 of 547 (51%) showed no consent banner while running at least one tracker, a non-essential cookie or pre-consent tracking. 223 (41%) ran Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager without a Google Consent Mode v2 signal.
Is this a sample of UAE online stores?
No. It is 547 business websites on .ae domains drawn from Common Crawl's public URL index: 71 online shops and 476 other business websites. Most UAE online stores use .com domains and are not in it. Each homepage was scanned once; 117 scans were inconclusive. The results are not a legal finding about any website.
Cite this report
Arqam360. "UAE Website Privacy Compliance Index", October 2026 edition (547 .ae business websites scanned). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23109874. https://arqam360.com/uae-compliance-index. Accessed [date accessed].
أرقام360 (Arqam360)، «مؤشّر امتثال المواقع الإماراتيّة لحماية البيانات الشخصيّة»، إصدار أكتوبر 2026 (547 موقعًا لشركات على نطاق .ae). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23109874. https://arqam360.com/uae-compliance-index. تاريخ الاطّلاع: [تاريخ الاطّلاع].
- Persistent identifier for this edition: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23109874
- Aggregate data for this edition, licensed CC BY 4.0: data/uae-compliance-index-2026-10.csv (the tables on this page; no per-site data)
- Permanent link to this section: https://arqam360.com/uae-compliance-index#cite-this-report
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