Consent Mode

Consent Mode is Google's mechanism for passing a visitor's consent choices to its tags, so analytics and advertising behave differently depending on what was granted. When consent is denied, tags send limited cookieless signals instead of writing identifiers, and Google models part of the missing conversion data. Teams care because for European traffic it decides whether audiences and conversions can be collected at all. The usual failure is a banner that loads after the tags, so the default state governs everything.