Cookie Banner & Consent Mode v2 Test
Does the site track visitors before they say yes? Test any website in a real browser: tags and cookies before consent, the reject option, Google Consent Mode v2, and what fires after accepting. Free, no signup.
Free, no signup. A real browser loads the page from the EU, before and after accepting the banner. Takes about 30 seconds.
A banner on the page proves nothing. What matters is what the browser does before the visitor clicks: a Meta Pixel that fires on load, a GA4 tag that reports consent as granted, a cookie dropped by an embedded video. Those are the things regulators test, and the things a cookie banner is supposed to prevent.
The other half is Google Consent Mode v2. Set the default too late, miss the two v2 signals, or forget to pass the update from the banner, and Google Ads quietly loses audiences and conversion modelling for your European traffic. This checker reads the live consent state so you can see all of it in one place.
Use it on your own site after every tag change, or on a prospect's site before a pitch. When something needs fixing, TrackingCoder generates consent-aware Google Tag Manager tracking for your exact site, no developer required.
Six things, in a real browser: whether analytics or ad tags send data before the visitor makes a choice, whether tracking cookies are set before consent, whether a consent banner appears on arrival, whether rejecting is offered on the first layer like accepting, whether Google Consent Mode v2 defaults are set to denied before Google tags fire, and whether tags actually start after the banner is accepted.
We open the page in a fresh headless Chrome in Amsterdam, with no cookies and no previous choices, and record every network request and cookie for a few seconds without touching the banner. Then we read the consent platform and Google's consent state, click the banner's accept button, and record what changes. The whole run takes about 30 seconds.
Many banners are geo-targeted and only appear for visitors in the EU or UK. Checking from Amsterdam shows the site as a GDPR visitor sees it. Results for a site that treats EU and non-EU visitors differently can therefore differ from what you see at home.
A request that carries data to an analytics, advertising or behaviour tool (for example a Meta Pixel event, a GA4 hit with consent reported as granted, a LinkedIn or Microsoft UET hit) before any interaction. Loading a library without sending anything is not counted. Google's cookieless Consent Mode pings (gcs=G100) are reported but not treated as a failure, and privacy-first tools like Plausible or Fathom are noted as cookieless.
Consent Mode tells Google tags what the visitor allowed. Version 2 added two signals, ad_user_data and ad_personalization, which Google has required since March 2024 for audiences, remarketing and conversion modelling with EEA traffic. The checker reads the live state of all seven consent types and reports whether defaults were denied before tags loaded, whether the default came too late, and whether the update after accepting reaches the tags.
Regulators including the ICO, CNIL and the EDPB expect refusing to take the same effort as accepting: one click, same layer, equal prominence. A banner with only Accept and Settings fails that expectation in most EU countries, so the checker flags it for review.
Over 40, including Cookiebot, OneTrust, CookieYes, Usercentrics, iubenda, Termly, Osano, Didomi, Axeptio, Quantcast Choice, Sourcepoint, TrustArc, consentmanager, CookieScript, CookieFirst, Complianz, Borlabs, Klaro, HubSpot, Shopify's privacy banner, Wix, Squarespace and Google Funding Choices, plus the IAB TCF v2 API. Unknown banners are found by looking for a visible dialog that talks about cookies and has buttons, including inside iframes and shadow DOM.
It checks one page, in one load, from one location. Sites behind bot protection (Cloudflare challenges, Akamai, DataDome) cannot be loaded. Tags that only fire on later pages, on scroll or on a click are not seen. Banners rendered in unusual ways may not be recognised, and the accept button may not be found, in which case the after-consent part is marked as not tested rather than guessed.
No. It is a technical observation of what the browser did on one visit. Whether a setup is lawful depends on your audience, your legal basis and your documentation. Use the result to find and fix technical problems, and ask a professional about the rest.
The usual fixes: block tracking tags until consent (or use Consent Mode so Google tags respect it), set the Consent Mode default to denied before Google Tag Manager loads, add a reject button to the first layer, and make the banner's update reach your tags. TrackingCoder generates Google Tag Manager containers with Consent Mode v2 built in, so new tracking starts out consent-aware. The Free Forever plan gives you 5 credits a month, no card.
Related: Google Consent Mode v2 guide · Website Tracking Checker · All guides