Does using Cookiebot affect my website's performance, SEO, ranking and indexation of content?

We have been cooperating closely with Google and others since 2015 to ensure that the use of Cookiebot does not negatively affect your website's ranking and the indexing of its content or the website's performance. This was an important requirement for Google prior to them officially listing Cookiebot on www.cookiechoices.org.

• Any search engine crawler will access your website simulating a "full consent" (in effect, the cookie consent banner will not be visible to the crawler). This way the crawler will have access to all content on the website (and not be excluded from certain parts of your website that may not be visible to users who have not accepted certain categories of cookies).
• The cookie texts from the cookie consent banner are not indexed by the crawler and will therefore not affect the indexation of your website.
• Cookiebot has minimal impact on the website's performance because the script is delivered in less than 100ms (on average). In automatic cookie blocking mode, the script is loaded synchronously in order to apply control over all other scripts loading. In manual mode, however, it can be loaded asynchronously - meaning the rest of the website is not waiting for the Cookiebot script to be loaded, further improving performance.*

In other words, the search engine crawler will not "see" or be "blocked" by a Cookiebot consent banner or in any other way be affected by the use of Cookiebot. Do note however, that optimization tools may not always reflect this.

Placeholder content

If you have content that takes up space that is blocked prior consent, for example embedded videos or images you may experience "layout shift".
To prevent this we recommend creating placeholder content of the exact same size to prevent layout shift.

Creating placeholders is described in this guide: Hide and show content based on the visitor's consent.

^* In some cases, a minor delay in rendering is unavoidable when using automatic blocking, since our script evaluates all the elements that are added to the DOM. If you do find that the rendering delay is noticeable, then you should look into implementing manual blocking mode (or use Google Tag Manager or a combination of the two), as using Cookiebot in manual mode does not cause any rendering delays and gives you full control over exactly which elements are blocked.