FreeRepublic uses Google analytics. The cookies used track you and everything you’re doing and send it back to Google.
~~~
I might be wrong but I believe Amazon had a jump on this sort of thing, although I am not sure they invented Alexa and I think Amazon bought them out, most people think of Alexa as a table top device with a friendly female voice like Siri, but it started out in the early 2000’s as site traffic index, page ranking, and content archiving site/service.
Don’t get me wrong, Google was already working ad-words and a lot of their other revenue generating services at the same time, but I don’t think Google analytics came out until later
Alexa the search engine traffic index (https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo) has nothing to do with Alexa, the digital assistant.