How should you verify Consent Mode is working on a live store?
Check the default consent state before any tag loads, walk through the accept, decline, and preference paths as a fresh visitor, and confirm the stored choice survives navigation and return visits. Verification is a checklist, not a glance at the banner.
Start with the default state
Open the store in a fresh browser profile or private window with a clean consent state. Before interacting with the banner, inspect what ran: Google tags should be present but in a denied-by-default state in advanced mode, or not loaded at all in basic mode. Open the browser developer console and confirm the default consent state fired before any marketing tag. If analytics fired with analytics_storage granted before the visitor chose anything, the setup is wrong and everything downstream inherits that error.
Walk the accept path
Click accept-all and check that the consent state updates, the update event fires, and tags upgrade to granted. Then place a test order or complete a test conversion and verify the conversion reaches Google Ads or Analytics with the right value and currency. Record the exact clicks you made. A store with three different "accept" buttons in different banner variants needs this test per variant, not once.
Walk the decline path
Repeat as a fresh visitor and decline. Confirm tags stay in the denied state, no advertising cookies are set, and the store still works: products browseable, cart functional, checkout reachable. In advanced mode, confirm cookieless pings go out as expected. In basic mode, confirm nothing Google-related fires. Then check your Google Ads conversion reports a few days later to confirm denied-state traffic behaves the way you configured it, modeled or absent, not misattributed.
Test the preference center and re-consent
Most banners let visitors change their minds. Test that path too: grant, then open preferences and withdraw; decline, then re-open and grant. Each change should update the stored consent state and the live tag behavior. Also confirm the banner does not reappear on every page for visitors who already chose, and that it does reappear when the consent cookie expires or is cleared. A preference center that writes a cookie but does not update the live consent state is decoration.
Confirm persistence across the journey
The consent choice must survive the whole shopping journey: category pages, product pages, cart, checkout, and the order confirmation page. Test on mobile and desktop, because many stores load different banner code or different tag timing per device. Also test after theme updates and app installs, because either can change when tags load relative to the consent script. A verification run is valid until the next deploy touches tags, templates, or the banner, then it is due again.