Comment by tialaramex
5 days ago
Unsurprisingly Google actually does also have IPv4 addresses. What they're measuring isn't "How did you reach our servers?" but instead "Could you have reached our IPv6 servers?"
So that measures everybody who has working IPv6. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
Where are you getting that claim from? Google’s page says “users that access Google over IPv6”.
To me the specifically does not say, “could you” reach the servers but “did you”.
My understanding (for which I can't give you a citation) is that a tiny fraction of Google visitors are randomly chosen to try to reach IPv6 servers and measure what happens.
Because of Happy Eyeballs if you measure whether your users did use IPv6 you don't find out whether they could have done so, and so your results will be thrown off by happenstance.
APNIC's stats check for that. For the US, it makes the difference between 58.74% capable and 57.85% preferring, so it doesn't produce a huge discrepancy.
I believe your understanding here is incorrect. It doesn’t make sense that Google would claim to measure usage while actually measuring access. I can’t find anything that supports your assertion.