Cookie Consent 2026 Statistics (Updated September)

How many websites show a cookie banner

1. 1

   67% of the top 10,000 websites across 31 European countries use a consent interface, and only 15% are minimally compliant, mostly because they lack a reject option.

   Source: CHI 2025 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), 2025 ^[1]

2. 2

   62.1% of websites in Europe displayed cookie consent notices after the GDPR took effect in May 2018, 16% more than in January 2018.

   Source: NDSS Symposium 2019, 2019 ^[2]

3. 3

   More than 60% of popular websites in Europe displayed cookie consent notices after the GDPR came into force.

   Source: ACM CCS 2019, 2019 ^[3]

4. 4

   Consent management platforms provide 67% of cookie consent interfaces, and three companies hold 37% of that market.

   Source: CHI 2025 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), 2025 ^[1]

5. 5

   Cookie walls, which make visitors pay or accept tracking, appear on 0.6% of 45,000 websites, and on 8.5% of Germany's top 1,000.

   Source: ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2023, 2023 ^[4]

Which consent tools large and small companies use

1. 6

   58.3% of Fortune 500 homepages load a consent-management tool Installmap fingerprints (275 of 472), against 42.8% of unicorns, 16.2% of the Inc 5000 (793 of 4,885) and 9.9% of Y Combinator companies (532 of 5,386).

   Source: Installmap · rendered homepage fetches, September 2026 crawl · 472 Fortune 500, 1,000 unicorn, 4,885 Inc 5000 and 5,386 YC homepages

2. 7

   OneTrust runs on 44.9% of Fortune 500 homepages (212 of 472), which is 77.1% of the Fortune 500 sites with any consent tool; TrustArc is second at 6.1%.

   Source: Installmap · rendered homepage fetches, September 2026 crawl · 472 Fortune 500 homepages; 275 with a consent tool

3. 8

   CookieYes is the most common consent tool on Inc 5000 homepages at 5.8% (284 of 4,885) and on Y Combinator company homepages at 2.9%, while OneTrust leads on unicorns at 20.9%.

   Source: Installmap · rendered homepage fetches, September 2026 crawl · 4,885 Inc 5000, 5,386 YC and 1,000 unicorn homepages

4. 9

   26.5% of the 1,572 Tranco top-10,000 homepages Installmap rendered (417) load a consent-management tool Installmap fingerprints, and OneTrust alone runs on 17.0% of them.

   Source: Installmap · rendered homepage fetches, September 2026 crawl · 1,572 Tranco top-10k homepages Installmap rendered

5. 10

   84.6% of Y Combinator company homepages that run a person-level visitor identifier have no consent-management tool detected (259 of 306), and 78.6% on the Inc 5000 (173 of 220).

   Source: Installmap · homepages crawled for the visitor identification report, September 2026 · 306 YC and 220 Inc 5000 homepages with a person-level visitor identifier

6. 11

   Across all visitor-identification taggers, 26.7% of Fortune 500 taggers have no consent tool detected (8 of 30), against 81.2% of Y Combinator taggers (530 of 653).

   Source: Installmap · homepages crawled for the visitor identification report, September 2026 · 30 Fortune 500 and 653 YC homepages with any visitor identification tag

How many cookie banners comply with the GDPR

1. 12

   The share of websites with a compliant "reject all" button rose from 2.94% in 2018 to 30.66% in 2024, in a historical study of 11,364 websites in 30 countries.

   Source: Annual Privacy Forum 2026, 2026 ^[5]

2. 13

   Only 11.8% of the consent pop-ups from the five most popular consent platforms on the UK's top 10,000 websites met minimal requirements based on EU law.

   Source: CHI 2020 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), 2020 ^[6]

3. 14

   54% of 560 websites tested had at least one cookie banner violation, such as recording consent before the visitor chose.

   Source: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020, 2020 ^[7]

4. 15

   141 websites registered positive consent before the visitor had made a choice, and 236 pre-selected the accept options.

   Source: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020, 2020 ^[7]

5. 16

   In a study that visited 2,579 websites, 45% of the relevant sites had fully compliant cookie banners, and 38% of those compliant banners used visual design to push visitors toward accepting.

   Source: ICWSM 2026 (AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media), 2026 ^[8]

6. 17

   13.9% of EU websites change their cookie banner design when the visitor is in the US.

   Source: ICWSM 2026 (AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media), 2026 ^[8]

7. 18

   EU websites are about 48.3% more likely than non-EU websites to use visual design that pushes visitors toward accepting cookies.

   Source: ICWSM 2026 (AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media), 2026 ^[8]

8. 19

   Consent-form violations were found on 94.1% of 3,598 consent forms across 5,823 websites, using an automated GDPR audit tool.

   Source: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2026, 2026 ^[9]

9. 20

   Consent management platforms explain 18% of the variation in cookie banner compliance, while regulators' guidance and fines show little measurable effect.

   Source: CHI 2025 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), 2025 ^[1]

Do websites track before or after consent

1. 21

   More than 75% of tracking on the websites studied happened before visitors could answer the cookie banner, or after they rejected all cookies.

   Source: The Web Conference (WWW) 2021, 2021 ^[10]

2. 22

   About 50% of websites send at least one tracking cookie that the visitor's banner choice does not control, in stateful crawls of over 20,000 Tranco domains.

   Source: Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2025, 2025 ^[11]

3. 23

   Turning on the Global Privacy Control browser signal cut cookies that ignore the banner choice by 30% on average, and rejecting the banner on later visits cut them by a further 32%.

   Source: Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2025, 2025 ^[11]

How visitors respond to cookie banners

1. 24

   25.4% of website visitors clicked "accept all" on the first level of a cookie banner in 2023, in Advance Metrics' cookie behaviour study.

   Source: Advance Metrics, Cookie Behaviour Study (May 2024), 2024 ^[12]

2. 25

   33.6% of visitors ignored the cookie banner completely in 2023, down from 76% in 2018.

   Source: Advance Metrics, Cookie Behaviour Study (May 2024), 2024 ^[12]

3. 26

   68.9% of visitors either closed or ignored the cookie banner, which leaves no consent for analytics cookies.

   Source: Advance Metrics, Cookie Behaviour Study (May 2024), 2024 ^[12]

4. 27

   Only 0.4% of visitors opened the cookie settings, and 28.3% of those saved a custom choice.

   Source: Advance Metrics, Cookie Behaviour Study (May 2024), 2024 ^[12]

5. 28

   More than 60% of users decline consent when offered a one-click "reject all" option, but about 90% give consent when opting out takes more than one click.

   Source: arXiv preprint 2402.18321, 2024 ^[13]

6. 29

   Removing the reject button from the first page of a consent pop-up raised consent by 22 to 23 percentage points in a field experiment; more granular controls on the first page lowered it by 8 to 20 points.

   Source: CHI 2020 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), 2020 ^[6]

7. 30

   Poland had the highest cookie consent rate in a 2021 survey at 64%, and the United States the lowest at 32%.

   Source: CookieYes, Internet cookie statistics (citing a 2021 survey), 2021 ^[14]

8. 31

   42% of consumers say they read cookie banners always or often.

   Source: Usercentrics, State of Digital Trust report, 2025 ^[15]

9. 32

   46% of consumers click "accept all" on cookie banners less often than they did three years ago.

   Source: Usercentrics, State of Digital Trust report, 2025 ^[15]

10. 33

    77% of consumers do not fully understand how brands collect and use their data.

    Source: Usercentrics, State of Digital Trust report, 2025 ^[15]

11. 34

    62% of consumers feel they have become the product, and 59% are uncomfortable with their data being used to train AI.

    Source: Usercentrics, State of Digital Trust report, 2025 ^[15]

12. 35

    56% of Americans frequently click "agree" on privacy policies without reading them.

    Source: Pew Research Center, How Americans View Data Privacy (October 2023), 2023 ^[16]

13. 36

    69% of Americans see privacy policies as just something to get past, and 61% think they do not explain how companies use data.

    Source: Pew Research Center, How Americans View Data Privacy (October 2023), 2023 ^[16]

14. 37

    67% of Americans say they understand little to nothing about what companies do with their personal data, up from 59% in 2019.

    Source: Pew Research Center, How Americans View Data Privacy (October 2023), 2023 ^[16]

Fines and the consent management market

1. 38

   France's data protection authority fined Google 325 million euros on September 1, 2025, partly for placing cookies without valid consent when users created Google accounts; the cookie breach concerned more than 74 million accounts.

   Source: CNIL (September 2025), 2025 ^[17]

2. 39

   The CNIL fined Shein 150 million euros on September 1, 2025 for placing cookies without consent on shein.com.

   Source: CNIL (September 2025), 2025 ^[18]

3. 40

   Usercentrics says its consent tools run on more than 2.3 million websites and apps in 195 countries.

   Source: Usercentrics, State of Digital Trust report, 2025 ^[15]

4. 41

   Mordor Intelligence values the consent management market at 0.91 billion dollars in 2025 and forecasts 2.34 billion dollars by 2031.

   Source: Mordor Intelligence, Consent Management Market report, 2026 ^[19]

5. 42

   Future Market Insights puts the same market at 0.5 billion dollars in 2025 and forecasts 1.4 billion dollars by 2035, less than half of Mordor's estimate.

   Source: Future Market Insights, Consent Management Market report, 2025 ^[20]

Frequently asked questions

How many websites have a cookie banner?

A 2025 CHI study of the top 10,000 websites in 31 European countries found a consent interface on 67% of them. Earlier measurements after the GDPR took effect found 62.1% of European websites showing a consent notice in 2018.

How many cookie banners are GDPR compliant?

The same 2025 study found only 15% of websites minimally compliant, mostly because they had no reject option. A historical study of 11,364 websites found the share with a compliant "reject all" button rose from 2.94% in 2018 to 30.66% in 2024.

What share of visitors accept cookies?

It depends on the banner. In Advance Metrics' 2023 data, 25.4% of visitors clicked "accept all" and 68.9% closed or ignored the banner. A 2024 study found more than 60% decline when a one-click reject button is offered, while about 90% accept when rejecting takes more than one click.

Which consent management platform do large companies use?

OneTrust is the most common. Installmap found it on 44.9% of Fortune 500 homepages, 77.1% of the Fortune 500 sites with any consent tool. Smaller companies lean on cheaper tools: CookieYes is the most common on Inc 5000 homepages at 5.8%.

What are the largest cookie consent fines?

On September 1, 2025, France's CNIL fined Google 325 million euros, partly over cookies placed without consent on more than 74 million accounts, and Shein 150 million euros for placing cookies without consent.

Sources

1. [1]CHI 2025 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems). 2025.↑1 ↑4 ↑20
2. [2]NDSS Symposium 2019. 2019.↑2
3. [3]ACM CCS 2019. 2019.↑3
4. [4]ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2023. 2023.↑5
5. [5]Annual Privacy Forum 2026. 2026.↑12
6. [6]CHI 2020 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems). 2020.↑13 ↑29
7. [7]IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2020. 2020.↑14 ↑15
8. [8]ICWSM 2026 (AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media). 2026.↑16 ↑17 ↑18
9. [9]IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2026. 2026.↑19
10. [10]The Web Conference (WWW) 2021. 2021.↑21
11. [11]Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2025. 2025.↑22 ↑23
12. [12]Advance Metrics, Cookie Behaviour Study (May 2024). 2024.↑24 ↑25 ↑26 ↑27
13. [13]arXiv preprint 2402.18321. 2024.↑28
14. [14]CookieYes, Internet cookie statistics (citing a 2021 survey). 2021.↑30
15. [15]Usercentrics, State of Digital Trust report. 2025.↑31 ↑32 ↑33 ↑34 ↑40
16. [16]Pew Research Center, How Americans View Data Privacy (October 2023). 2023.↑35 ↑36 ↑37
17. [17]CNIL (September 2025). “Cookies and advertisements inserted between emails: Google fined 325 million euros”. 2025.↑38
18. [18]CNIL (September 2025). “Cookies placed without consent: Shein fined 150 million euros”. 2025.↑39
19. [19]Mordor Intelligence, Consent Management Market report. 2026.↑41
20. [20]Future Market Insights, Consent Management Market report. 2025.↑42

Method

We searched Google for cookie consent statistics, cookie banner statistics and consent management statistics, read the statistics pages that ranked and the surveys they cite, and searched arXiv for measurement studies of cookie banners published at privacy, security and HCI conferences. Each number was checked against its producer's page on September 24, 2026. Paper numbers come from the abstracts, and the source line names the conference where the paper appeared or was accepted. Most compliance studies look at European websites, so their shares do not describe the US web. One consent-rate figure (Poland and the US, 2021) is quoted from CookieYes, which does not name the survey, and is marked as secondary. The Installmap counts come from rendered homepage fetches in September 2026: a headless browser loads each homepage and the result is matched against 11 consent-management fingerprints. A site with a hand-built banner, or one that shows its banner only to EU visitors, counts as having no tool, so every Installmap share is a floor. The visitor-identification overlap is reused from Installmap's September 2026 report on visitor identification tags.

All 42 statistics as a CSV: cookie-consent-statistics.csv.

Cite this page

Installmap, “Cookie Consent 2026 Statistics (Updated September)”, updated September 2026, https://installmap.com/research/cookie-consent-statistics

To cite one number, link its anchor: each statistic has one, for example https://installmap.com/research/cookie-consent-statistics#stat-1.