Automatic Cookie Blocking - How does it work?

With Automatic Cookie Blocking Cookiebot will block all cookies except those strictly necessary from being set until a user has given their consent.

Based on their consent and the categories opted into, if any, Cookiebot will allow the cookies in these categories to be set.

The way our solution works is the following:

The Cookiebot Scanner scans your website and identifies all cookies being set AND the scripts, iframes, videos, images etc. setting them, as well as a number of other methods used to track users and set cookies (Including pixels, among others - See: What kinds of cookies and tracking technologies does the Cookiebot scanner find?)

Based on the scan and paired with the classification of cookies in our manager, a configuration file is automatically built and made available to the consent banner implemented on your website.

Every time we scan your website and every time you make a changes to your settings in the Cookiebot Manager, your configuration file is updated and the latest information is applied when automatically blocking cookies on your website.

To provide your users with the best possible experience and to ensure that informed consent is given, please make sure to routinely categorize your unclassified cookies. Use your monthly report to see new cookies we’ve identified since last scan, and to check that everything is categorized appropriately.

When your website is accessed by a user, our consent banner will instantly read and apply the configuration, allowing all necessary cookies and blocking the rest, until all, some or none are allowed, based on the consent given by the users interaction with the banner.

The way it technically works is that each cookie setting script and element is identified and registered in a way that it can be uniquely identified again at a later stage. Our algorithm includes a number of steps to identify and verify the script, among them content checksum, file, path and keyword matching, and more.

If one script has been assessed to be the initiator of several cookies and these cookies belong to different categories, then the script will be blocked unless all categories the cookies belong to have been consented to.

To exemplify:

The script abc.js is the source of two cookies: a preference cookie named favorite_page and a statistics cookie named visitor_stats.

If the user visiting the website decides to give their consent to only preference cookies, opting out of statistics and marketing cookies, all scripts setting statistics and marketing cookies will be blocked.

In our example abc.js would be blocked as well and favorite_page would not be set, despite the user opting in to preference cookies.