← Back

How we measure cookies

Simple version · for product, legal, management Evidence: unsigned

How we measure

We open the website in a real browser, click Accept on the consent banner, and record every cookie that gets set during the visit. We do this five times in a row.

We also pull the cookies our nightly compliance monitoring has recorded for this site over the last 30 days.

Why different scans see different things

Online advertising is auction-based. Every time a page loads, ad networks bid for the slot in real time, and a different bidder usually wins. The winning bidder sets its cookies. The next visit, a different bidder wins, and a different set of cookies appears.

That's why we run five scans — to tell the difference between cookies that always fire on the site and cookies that only show up some of the time. Both still count for compliance: a cookie set even once before consent is a problem.

What the columns mean

The combination that matters: Seen by users + In monitoring = a cookie that every visitor gets, but our compliance system has no record of. That's the gap.

The pre-consent / post-consent tabs

Each tab is filtered by when the cookie was first set, relative to the moment we clicked Accept:

The time value (e.g. −3.2s) is how many seconds before or after the Accept click the cookie first appeared in any of the five scans.