What Is Google Consent Mode?

Google Consent Mode (v2) is Google's framework that allows Google tags to adjust their behavior based on a visitor's consent status, running in a limited, cookieless state when consent is declined, and using Conversion Modeling to estimate the conversions that limited state can't directly measure.

Consent Mode is Google’s attempt to let advertisers keep some measurement capability from users who decline tracking, without violating that decline. In ‘basic’ implementation, Google tags don’t fire at all until consent is granted; in ‘advanced’ implementation, tags fire in a restricted, cookieless mode sending anonymized pings rather than full tracking data. Verifying which mode is actually configured matters, because a misconfiguration can mean tags default to full tracking rather than the restricted Cookieless Tracking state they’re supposed to fall back to.