Where does Safari store third-party website trackers?

Hello midiguitar, and welcome to the Apple Support Community.

The existing reply is correct regarding cookie removal, but Safari’s tracking prevention is more complex than traditional cookies alone.

With Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), Safari doesn’t store all third-party tracking information in a single, user-accessible location. Depending on the tracking technology used, data may be stored as cookies, local storage, IndexedDB, cache, or may be blocked or partitioned entirely by WebKit. Some tracking data is also managed internally by Safari and WebKit and isn’t intended to be inspected or removed manually from the file system.

If your goal is to determine whether a specific website is still able to track your browsing, enabling Prevent cross-site tracking and reviewing Manage Website Data is the supported approach.

Manually searching the Library folders won’t necessarily reveal all tracking-related data because Safari abstracts much of this management.

Helpful links:

Prevent cross-site tracking in Safari on Mac - Apple Support

Trust caches - Apple Support

Apple Platform Security - Apple Support

If you’re investigating a specific tracker or storage mechanism (for example cookies, Local Storage, IndexedDB, Service Workers, or cache), let us know what you’ve found so far. That additional detail may help other members of the Apple Support Community with similar investigations.

🙏🏻

Have a good Day.

And one more thing…

Never forget to think different.



If you see ads related to that website, it is most likely a or several advertisement tracking cookies are involved. They most likely won't bear the name of the website.

If you want to stop that tracking remove all the cookies, go to Safari > Settings > Privacy, click Manage Website Data, wait for all the cookies to load and click Remove All.

How do you know you are being tracked?

It is true that even if you remove all the cookies, some websites fingerprint your device and can still infer who you are. You can test this by using another web browser.