Cookiebot in the Consent Gap Index
Cookiebot is a consent management platform. A site installs it, and it draws the cookie dialog a visitor sees on first load, stores the answer, and — depending on how the site configures it — can hold scripts back until that answer exists. Most people meet the name in the fine print of a banner or in a browser's network log. This index detected it on 106 sites out of 5,294 measured, which is 2 percent of the set and rank 3 of the nine consent platforms recorded here by number of sites. The banner itself is not the interesting part. The pages behind it are.
Quiet pages: 27 requests at the median
The median site carrying Cookiebot contacted 5 separate companies across 27 requests, with 1 of those companies classified as tracking. Among the nine consent platforms in this index, that median request count ranks 9th of 9, where rank 1 is the busiest median page. The median company count ranks 7th of 9 and the median tracker count 5th of 9.
That is a coherent picture rather than three unrelated numbers. Cookiebot in this sample sits on comparatively quiet pages: business software, certificate authorities, publishers with small stacks. It does not sit on the kind of page that opens twenty auction connections before the header renders.
105 of the 106 sites had contact before the banner could be answered
On 105 sites — 99.1 percent, rank 4 of 9 among the consent platforms here — at least one company was contacted before a consent choice could have been recorded. The median site had 5 companies arrive inside that window. Separately, the median count of companies appearing after the window closed is 0.
Those two figures describe different distributions and should be read that way, not subtracted from each other. Read plainly, they say that on a typical Cookiebot site the third-party contact is front-loaded: what the page was going to reach, it reached early, and little new showed up afterwards.
Same platform, very different results
The spread inside these 106 sites is wider than the medians suggest, and configuration is the obvious variable.
launchdarkly.com contacted 9 companies and all 9 of them arrived before the window closed, first contact at 249 ms. issuu.com: 3 companies, all 3 early, at 341 ms. nexusmods.com is the heaviest example in the set at 17 companies, 12 of them early, first contact 472 ms. criteo.com contacted 12 with 8 early at 495 ms.
At the other end, oxylabs.io also contacted 12 companies but only 2 of them landed inside the window, with first contact at 857 ms. one.one contacted 5 with 2 early, first contact 1298 ms. Same banner product, an order-of-magnitude difference in how much of the page waited.
Timing
Median first contact across Cookiebot sites was 579 ms. The earliest single first contact recorded was 108 ms. Among the nine platforms indexed here that median ranks 7th of 9, where rank 1 is the longest wait — so these pages start talking to third parties sooner than most of the field, not later.
The examples fill that in. action.com made first contact at 311 ms with 3 of its 4 companies early. weforum.org: 433 ms, 6 companies, all 6 early. adjust.com: 531 ms, 5 and 5. hltv.org lands exactly on the median at 579 ms with 5 companies, all early. globalsign.com: 643 ms, 7 of 8 early. sectigo.com: 819 ms, 6 of 7.
What the crawl does not settle
The crawl records when a site's third-party contact happened relative to the consent window. It does not record where Cookiebot's own requests sat in that sequence, so nothing here is a verdict on how the product behaved on these pages.
What is available: early contact happened on 105 of the 106 sites where Cookiebot was detected, the median site saw 5 companies inside that window, and the range across individual sites runs from 2 to 12.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| criteo.com | 12 | 8 | 495 ms |
| one.one | 5 | 2 | 1298 ms |
| oxylabs.io | 12 | 2 | 857 ms |
| launchdarkly.com | 9 | 9 | 249 ms |
| issuu.com | 3 | 3 | 341 ms |
| globalsign.com | 8 | 7 | 643 ms |
| adjust.com | 5 | 5 | 531 ms |
| weforum.org | 6 | 6 | 433 ms |
| nexusmods.com | 17 | 12 | 472 ms |
| hltv.org | 5 | 5 | 579 ms |
| sectigo.com | 7 | 6 | 819 ms |
| action.com | 4 | 3 | 311 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| Cookiebot | 106 |
Questions
What is Cookiebot?
A consent management platform: the software that renders a site's cookie banner, records the visitor's answer and, if the site enables it, gates other scripts on that answer. In this index it was detected on 106 of the 5,294 sites measured.
Did Cookiebot prevent tracking before consent on these sites?
The measurement cannot answer that at the platform level. It records, per site, that a company was contacted before a choice could have been recorded — true on 105 of 106 sites — but not which company, and not where the banner's own requests sat relative to that window.
Are Cookiebot sites busy pages?
Less than most in this comparison. The median is 27 requests to 5 companies, which ranks 9th of the 9 consent platforms here by median request count, where rank 1 is the busiest.
How fast is first contact on a Cookiebot site?
579 ms at the median, with the earliest single case at 108 ms. Individual sites vary a lot: launchdarkly.com at 249 ms, one.one at 1298 ms.
How common is Cookiebot in this index?
106 sites, 2 percent of the 5,294 measured, rank 3 of the nine consent platforms detected.