A Scoping Review of Methods to Measure the Energy and Carbon Footprint of Web Tracking and Advertising

Abstract

The environmental impact of web tracking and advertising is increasingly receiving attention as the ICT sector's carbon footprint keeps rising. Yet the scholarship addressing this question remains scattered across disciplines and inconsistent in its terminology. This paper presents a scoping review of the literature on methods for measuring the energy and carbon footprint of web tracking and advertising. From an initial pool of 46 articles identified through a structured title-based search on Google Scholar, we arrived at a final corpus of 15 papers, from which we identified five distinct methodological approaches: ad blocking, controlled environment, replaying ads, traffic flow analysis, and literature-derived estimation. This review provides a structured overview of the current methodological landscape and a foundation for more comprehensive environmental accounting of the ad tech ecosystem.

5 pages, 0 figures. Accepted at the 2nd International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2026), Lancaster University, United Kingdom, 10-11 September 2026. Part of the LOCO 2026 proceedings, arXiv:2608.02072