What detecting Drift tells you about a site
Drift is a conversational-marketing and sales-chat platform, loaded as a widget script that injects a chat bubble and exposes a drift global on the page. Unlike a support tool, Drift is aimed at the funnel — capturing and qualifying leads, booking demos and routing prospects to sales reps. Catching it tells you the site is run by a revenue-driven org with a sales motion, typically B2B SaaS selling to other businesses. Its presence implies a marketing and sales-ops team measuring conversation-to-pipeline rather than a pure customer-support setup.
Drift in a real-world stack
When you find Drift, it rarely travels alone. Sits beside a marketing automation/CRM stack (think Salesforce or HubSpot) and usually a separate analytics tag tracking the same funnel.
About
Drift is a conversational marketing platform.
Categories: Live chat
Quick facts
Detection methodology for Live chat
Live chat widgets are usually loaded asynchronously via a small bootstrap script and identify themselves through a vendor-specific runtime global. Intercom's `Intercom` global plus `widget.intercom.io`; Drift's `drift.load` plus `js.driftt.com`; Crisp's `$crisp` plus `client.crisp.chat`. We pick up the vendor and — when sourcemaps are available — the SDK version, which is meaningful when chat features change between major releases.
How we detect Drift
Sourcemap Explorer carries 2 fingerprint signals for Drift, spread across 1 channel — javascript global. The exact patterns are listed below, and you can replay each one in Chrome DevTools to confirm a match by hand.
Each signal alone is rarely conclusive — Sourcemap Explorer cross-references all of them and weights by confidence. You can reproduce any of these checks yourself in Chrome DevTools.
Window-level global the technology installs on page. Reproducible by typing the path into the DevTools console.
window.drift
window.driftt
FAQ
How do I check if a website is using Drift?
Open the page in Chrome, click the Sourcemap Explorer toolbar icon, and read the Stack tab. Drift's specific fingerprints here are javascript global, and the popup flags Drift whenever any combination of them is found. The same checks can be reproduced manually in DevTools — see the "How we detect" section above.
What Drift version can Sourcemap Explorer detect?
Drift ships as a hosted live chat rather than a bundled npm package, so version-specific detection isn't always possible. Where the platform leaks a version in response headers (`X-Powered-By`, `Server`, generator meta tags) we surface it; otherwise we report presence only.
Is Drift a SaaS or self-hosted?
Drift is offered as a hosted SaaS product. Detection runs against the JavaScript SDK or asset-URL fingerprints the platform ships into pages.
How much does Drift cost?
Drift's pricing model is documented as: poa, mid. Detection is independent of the pricing tier — Sourcemap Explorer flags the technology by its fingerprints, regardless of which paid plan a site is on. See the official site for the current pricing page.
Where can I read more about Drift?
Official site: https://www.drift.com/. For Sourcemap Explorer's detection guide, see the deep-dive link below or the related guides in the cross-link section.
Keep reading on Sourcemap Explorer
Practical guides
Alternative tools
Detected by Sourcemap Explorer
Open the popup on any page running Driftand you'll see the exact version pulled from the bundled package.json when sourcemaps are exposed.