Consent management platform

Presenting the choice, with controls to accept, to refuse, and to manage categories individually.

Recording the answer with enough detail to show later what was consented to, when, and against which version of the text.

Gating the tags: not loading the scripts a visitor refused, which requires every tag to be under the platform's control.

Re-offering the choice — both when the categories change and when the visitor asks to change their mind, which needs a reachable control after the banner is gone.

Showing a banner is a front-end change anyone can ship in an afternoon.

Blocking tags means routing every one of them through the platform, which means finding every tag — including the ones inside a tag manager, and the ones a template adds directly.

A tag added after the platform was installed bypasses it by default, because nothing makes a new script ask permission.

So the configuration decays: correct on the day it was set up, and progressively less so with every tag anyone adds afterwards.

Which is why what loads before a choice is made is worth measuring rather than assuming from the banner's presence.

Whether a banner is present in the served markup, and which platform it appears to be.

Whether accept, refuse and preference controls are observable in that markup.

Whether trackers execute before any choice has been made — read from what the page loads, not from what the banner claims.

Whether a cookie policy page, or a cookie section in a privacy policy, is published and reachable.

Whether a choice is actually recorded, or honoured on the next page, or on the next visit.

Whether refusing really prevents the tags from loading, which needs a browser session that refuses and then watches.

Whether the record kept would satisfy anyone auditing it.

And no compliance conclusion at all, since what obligations apply depends on jurisdiction, audience and purpose — none of which a scan knows.

It has to load before the tags it gates, which puts it on the critical path of every page and makes its own weight a performance consideration.

It usually stores the answer in a first-party cookie, which is itself a cookie — and one that is strictly necessary, so it does not require consent.

Tags routed through a tag manager are gated by the platform only if the tag manager itself is configured to consult it, which is a second integration rather than an automatic consequence of the first.

A platform that fails to load leaves the page with no banner and, depending on the wiring, either no tags at all or all of them.