![92% of Fortune 500 Sites Have Terms and Conditions [2026]](/_astro/how-many-websites-have-terms-and-conditions.Dz4ZBPkN_Z1Kn1kU.webp)
92% of Fortune 500 companies have a website Terms of Use page in place, according to Greenberg Traurig's 2023 audit of major corporate websites. That is the most complete answer available to how many websites carry a formal terms and conditions page, though the true figure across the world's roughly 1.1 billion active sites, most of them small businesses and personal projects with no in-house legal team, is not independently measured by anyone.
What the data does show is a full picture of one large, well-documented population: the largest public companies in America. Below is how Terms of Use adoption compares to the other legal pages those same companies carry, how the numbers have moved since 2020, and how often shoppers actually see a terms and conditions page before they check out.
How many Fortune 500 websites have a terms and conditions page?
92% of Fortune 500 companies have a website Terms of Use page in place, and 8% do not, according to a study published by law firm Greenberg Traurig in June 2023. The finding comes from an ongoing research project the firm's Data, Privacy and Cybersecurity Practice has run since at least 2020, auditing the same pool of roughly 555 companies (firms that have ranked in the Fortune 500 within the past five years, plus additional companies added to cover industries otherwise underrepresented in the list) by visiting each company's website directly.
The 92% figure is the clearest large-sample answer to "how many websites have terms and conditions" that currently exists, but it only covers one segment of the web: the biggest, most legally exposed companies in the country. A small e-commerce store, a personal blog, or a local service business faces none of the audit pressure, class-action risk, or in-house legal staffing that pushes Fortune 500 adoption this close to universal, so extrapolating 92% onto the wider internet would overstate how common terms and conditions pages actually are.
| Legal page | Fortune 500 adoption | Data collected | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Terms of Use | 92% | June 2023 | Greenberg Traurig |
| Privacy policy updated for CCPA | 71% | October 2022 | Greenberg Traurig |
| Cookie banner | 45% | October 2022 | Greenberg Traurig |
| Arbitration clause in Terms of Use | 28% | 2023 to 2024 | Greenberg Traurig |
What percentage of Fortune 500 terms of use include an arbitration clause?
28% of Fortune 500 companies include an arbitration provision inside their terms of use, per Greenberg Traurig's follow-up study, first reported in August 2023 and refined with a provider breakdown in April 2024. Arbitration clauses route disputes to a private arbitrator instead of a courtroom, and companies that use them are not evenly split on which provider they name.
Figure 1: Provider share among the 28% of Fortune 500 companies whose terms of use include an arbitration clause. The three categories total 98%, not 100%, because Greenberg Traurig's report did not break out the remaining share of other or unspecified providers. Source: Greenberg Traurig, April 2024.
The American Arbitration Association leads by a wide margin, named in 56% of arbitration clauses, with JAMS a distant second at 36%. A smaller group of companies, 6%, include an arbitration requirement without naming any specific provider at all, leaving the choice open at the time a dispute actually arises.
How does terms of use adoption compare to other legal pages on the same sites?
Terms of use is the single most common legal page on a Fortune 500 website, ahead of an updated privacy policy and well ahead of a cookie banner, based on the same company pool audited across Greenberg Traurig's research series.
Figure 2: Adoption rate by legal page type, Fortune 500 companies. Source: Greenberg Traurig, 2022 to 2024 installments.
The gap between 92% and 45% is wide enough to matter. A cookie banner requires ongoing consent-management infrastructure and a defensible legal basis for every tracking technology on the page, while a terms of use page is largely a one-time drafting exercise that rarely needs updating once a company settles on its liability limits, dispute-resolution process, and acceptable-use rules. That difference in ongoing maintenance cost likely explains part of why terms of use adoption sits so much closer to universal than cookie banner adoption does.
Has legal page adoption among Fortune 500 companies changed over time?
Cookie banner adoption grew noticeably between 2020 and 2022, while CCPA-driven privacy policy updates barely moved over the same period, according to two separate installments of Greenberg Traurig's research series.
Figure 3: First line is cookie banner adoption, second line is CCPA-updated privacy policy adoption, both among the same audited company pool. Source: Greenberg Traurig, December 2020 and October 2022 installments.
Cookie banners climbed from 34.2% to 45%, an 11-point jump, as more companies built out consent-management tooling in response to state privacy laws expanding past California. Privacy policy updates for the CCPA specifically held almost flat, 71.8% down to 71%, which reads less like stagnation and more like a population that had already reached its ceiling: companies that intended to update their policy for a 2020 law had, for the most part, already done so by the time the law took effect, and the remaining 28 to 29% likely fall below the CCPA's applicability thresholds entirely rather than being non-compliant holdouts.
Figure 4: Milestones from the same ongoing research project. Source: Greenberg Traurig, Data Privacy Dish blog, 2020 to 2024.
How many online shoppers actually see a terms and conditions page before buying?
Only 9.4% of shoppers voluntarily click through to open a terms and conditions link when it is not required, according to the European Commission's 2016 study of consumer attitudes toward online terms and conditions, which surveyed more than 13,000 respondents across 12 EU member states plus two earlier preliminary studies in the Netherlands and Poland. Having a terms and conditions page is not the same question as whether anyone looks at it, and the two numbers tell very different stories.
The European Commission researchers ran live checkout experiments at real and simulated online stores, varying whether the terms and conditions had to be scrolled through by default or could only be reached by clicking an optional link. When opening the page was optional, just 9.4% of shoppers bothered to click, but when scrolling through the terms and conditions was built into the checkout flow itself, 77.9% of shoppers reported at least scanning it. Regardless of which format the store used, between 90% and 95% of shoppers in the same experiments went on to accept the terms and complete their purchase. Reading rates and length are covered in far more depth in Terms of Service Statistics 2026, and exact reading times by document length are broken down in How Long Does It Take to Read Terms of Service?.
Does every website need a terms and conditions page?
Company size and industry exposure explain most of the gap between Fortune 500 adoption and adoption everywhere else, but the underlying legal logic for whether a site needs a terms and conditions page does not actually depend on company size.
Figure 5: A basic decision path for whether a site needs a terms and conditions page. Source: general contract-law principles summarized from the studies above.
Any site that processes a transaction, hosts an account, or accepts user-generated content takes on legal exposure that a terms and conditions page is specifically designed to limit: acceptable use rules, liability caps, a dispute-resolution process, and clear ownership of intellectual property. A site that is purely informational carries less exposure but is not exposure-free, since even a static brochure site benefits from a governing-law clause and a liability disclaimer if a visitor claims to have relied on something the site said. Small businesses without a Fortune 500 legal budget can still close most of that gap quickly: you can generate a terms and conditions page covering acceptable use, liability limits, and dispute resolution without starting from a blank page.
The Bottom Line
Terms of use is close to universal among the biggest public companies in America, at 92%, but that number describes the segment of the web with the most legal review, not the web as a whole. No comparable large-sample audit exists for small businesses, personal sites, or the long tail of the internet, so the honest answer to "how many websites have terms and conditions" is that adoption is high where legal risk and company size are both high, and unmeasured everywhere else. What the data does establish clearly is that having the page and anyone actually reading it are separate problems: even at stores that require shoppers to scroll past the terms and conditions before checking out, fewer than four in five shoppers report even scanning it. A site that wants the legal protection a terms and conditions page provides needs to publish one regardless of company size, since the underlying liability exposure does not scale down just because the business is small.
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of websites have terms and conditions? No independent study has measured this across the entire web, but the best available data point is that 92% of Fortune 500 companies have a website Terms of Use page in place, per Greenberg Traurig's 2023 audit of major corporate websites. Adoption is almost certainly lower among the roughly 1.1 billion active sites online, most of which are small sites without in-house legal review.
How many Fortune 500 websites have an arbitration clause in their terms of use? 28% of Fortune 500 companies include an arbitration provision in their terms of use, according to Greenberg Traurig's 2023 and 2024 study updates. Of the companies with an arbitration clause, 56% name the American Arbitration Association as the provider, 36% name JAMS, and 6% include a clause without naming a specific provider.
How many Fortune 500 companies updated their privacy policy for the CCPA? 71% had updated their privacy policy for the CCPA as of October 2022, per Greenberg Traurig's survey of 554 companies, almost unchanged from 71.8% recorded in December 2020. That plateau suggests most companies that intended to update did so within the first 12 months of the law taking effect.
How often do online shoppers actually see a terms and conditions page before buying? Only 9.4% of shoppers voluntarily click through to open a terms and conditions page when it is optional, according to the European Commission's 2016 study of more than 13,000 consumers across 12 EU countries. That figure rises to 77.9% at least scanning the page when scrolling through it is the default step in checkout.
Where the Numbers Come From
- Greenberg Traurig, LLP. (2023, June 7). "The Importance of Website Terms of Use: Insights from Greenberg Traurig's Data on Fortune 500 Companies." 92% of Fortune 500 companies have a website terms of use agreement in place.
- Greenberg Traurig, LLP. (2024, April 29). "Fortune 500 Terms of Use Utilize Varying Arbitration Providers." 28% of Fortune 500 companies include an arbitration provision; 56% name the American Arbitration Association, 36% name JAMS, 6% name no provider.
- Greenberg Traurig, LLP. (2023, August 16). "Arbitration Provisions in Terms of Use? Fortune 500s are Split." Earlier installment first reporting the 28% arbitration-clause figure.
- Greenberg Traurig, LLP. (2022, December 7). "How Many Websites Now Have Cookie Banners?" 45% of Fortune 500 websites used a cookie banner as of October 2022, up from 34.2% in December 2020, based on an audit of 555 companies visited via Chrome from a California IP address.
- Greenberg Traurig, LLP. (2022, November 18). "CPRA's Effective Date is Around the Corner: But How Many Businesses Actually Updated Their Privacy Policies the First Time for the CCPA?" 71% of a 554-company Fortune 500 sample had updated their privacy policy for the CCPA as of October 2022.
- Greenberg Traurig, LLP. (2020, December 30). "How Many Businesses Updated Their Privacy Policies for the CCPA?" 71.8% of Fortune 500 companies had updated their privacy policy for the CCPA as of December 2020, 12 months after the law took effect.
- European Commission. (2016, June). "Study on Consumers' Attitudes Towards Online Terms and Conditions (T&Cs), Executive Summary." Main study of 12,000 respondents across 12 EU member states, plus preliminary studies of 6,045 and 1,012 respondents in the Netherlands and Poland.
Note: All figures verified as of August 2026. The Greenberg Traurig figures come from an ongoing research series and are refreshed by the firm periodically; check for a newer installment before citing a specific percentage as current beyond 2026.
