How the check works
The scan watches the page before anyone chooses. Then it presses the banner's own accept control and watches again. The difference between the two is the result.
It presses accept only, and only a control it can identify as a consent banner's: a known tool's button (OneTrust, Cookiebot, Usercentrics, CookieYes, Didomi, Complianz, iubenda, Shopify and others) or an accept-worded button inside something that names cookies or consent. It never clicks a generic “OK” somewhere on the page, and it reports the label of what it pressed. The browser is thrown away afterwards, so nothing is stored and nothing lands in your reports.
What it reports
- Tags that did not wait. Each tag that sent data while the banner was on screen and unanswered, with its first request and the time.
- Cookieless pings. Google hits before the choice that declare consent denied (
gcs=G100). That is Advanced Consent Mode working as designed, and it is reported as such, not as a fault. - Consent Mode v2 gaps. A consent default that sets ad_storage and analytics_storage but not
ad_user_dataorad_personalization, read from the dataLayer or from thegcdvalue on Google's requests. - No Consent Mode at all next to a banner while Google tags are in use, which means those tags are not told what the visitor chose.
- Tags released after accept. Quiet before the choice, sending after: consent gating is working.
Limits worth knowing
One location
We scan from one place. A banner shown only to visitors from certain regions may not appear to our browser, and tags that stay silent then are marked not verified, not broken.
The reject path
The scan accepts the banner; it does not test what a refusal does.
What the report says
This is the finding TagZ writes when it sees this fault, word for word.
Meta Pixel sent data before the cookie banner was answered
The banner asks for a choice, but this tag did not wait for it. Where visitors must opt in first (the EU and UK, for example) that is the gap consent tools exist to close; where opt-out is the rule it may be intended. This is a technical observation about timing, not legal advice.
Suggested fix
Put these tags behind the consent tool's categories (or its Consent Mode integration) so they are held until a choice is made, for the regions where that is required. Then re-scan: they should appear only after the banner is accepted.
This is a technical check of timing: what was sent, and when, relative to the banner. It is not legal advice and does not say what any law requires of your site.
A scan is one look. Tags break later.
A theme update, a plugin, a new cookie banner, someone tidying up an old account: tracking rarely breaks loudly. TagZ monitoring runs this same check every six hours in a real browser and emails you when a tag that was working stops sending, after a second scan has confirmed it.
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