Third-Party Cookies Are Not Going Away. Your Consent Strategy Still Has to Change.
The predicted end of third-party cookies never came to Chrome. Google announced the removal in 2020, postponed it from 2022 to 2023 to 2024, and in July 2024 said it would keep them and leave the choice to users. If your consent strategy was built on the assumption that cookies were dying, it was built on a deadline that no longer exists.
What actually happened
Google announced in 2020 that Chrome would remove third-party cookies, replacing them with Privacy Sandbox APIs. The deadline slipped repeatedly while advertisers and regulators pushed back, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority ordered a pause in January 2024 over competition concerns, worried the change would entrench Google's own advertising dominance. Google ran a test that turned cookies off for 1 percent of Chrome users in January 2024, then announced on July 22, 2024 that it would not remove them at all.
The announcement, from Google Vice President of Privacy Sandbox Anthony Chavez, said the company would instead introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and adjust that choice at any time. In April 2025 Google said it would not add a new standalone prompt either, and would keep the existing cookie settings. In October 2025 it retired most of the Privacy Sandbox, including the Topics API, citing low adoption.
The reversal ended a five-year endeavor, and it did not end the pressure on tracking. Safari began restricting cross-site tracking with Intelligent Tracking Prevention in 2017 and now blocks third-party cookies by default. Firefox isolates them per site. And in the EU, third-party cookies need consent first under GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, regardless of what Chrome does. The browser that matters most to your revenue kept the cookies. The browsers and the laws that matter most to your compliance did not follow.
What this means for a consent banner
First, the banner is not going away. A site that planned to retire its consent management platform when cookies died now has to maintain it indefinitely, because the legal requirement never depended on Chrome's roadmap. GDPR consent, TCF strings, and consent records are still required for EU traffic, and the banner is still the mechanism that collects them. Related reading: The Best Cookiebot Alternatives for Growing Sites.
Second, the alternatives Google promoted are mostly gone. The Topics API, which was to let a browser tell advertisers a few broad interests instead of sharing a cookie, was retired in October 2025. The remaining Privacy Sandbox APIs, CHIPS, the Storage Access API, Related Website Sets, and Federated Credential Management, are voluntary and depend on advertisers adopting them. The industry's replacement plan is now a mix of first-party data, hashed email identifiers, server-side tagging, and the walled-garden audiences of Google and Meta, none of which removes the need for consent.
Third, the measurement gap is permanent. Third-party cookies still work in Chrome for users who have not blocked them and, in the EU, who said yes to the banner. But Safari and Firefox users never see them, and a growing share of Chrome users block them in settings. A measurement strategy that assumes third-party cookies exist will undercount Safari and Firefox traffic and overcount Chrome, and the consent-mode modeling that fills the gap only works when the banner fires the right signals. More on this: A Practical Audit Checklist for Consent Mode Signals.
What to do instead of waiting
Stop planning around a cookie death that is not coming, and build the consent stack for the world that exists. That means a banner that collects real consent, Consent Mode v2 signals that transmit it to Google, first-party data collection that does not depend on a third-party cookie, and server-side tagging for the conversions that client-side tags miss. The sites that did this work in 2024, when the phaseout looked certain, are the ones that are fine now. The sites that waited for the deadline are the ones still arguing about whether they need a banner at all.
Frequently asked questions
Did Google remove third-party cookies from Chrome?
No. Google announced the removal in 2020, postponed it several times, and abandoned the forced phase-out in July 2024. Chrome keeps third-party cookies, with user-level controls in settings.
Does Safari block third-party cookies?
Yes, by default. Safari began restricting cross-site tracking with Intelligent Tracking Prevention in 2017, and Firefox isolates third-party cookies per site.
Do I still need a consent banner?
Yes, for EU traffic. GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive require consent before setting tracking cookies, regardless of what Chrome does with them.
What happened to the Topics API?
Google retired it in October 2025, along with most other Privacy Sandbox APIs, citing low adoption. The replacement plan is now first-party data, hashed identifiers, and server-side tagging.