💡 Does this article apply to you? Consent Modes only apply to websites that receive visitors from the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. What matters is the location of your visitors, not your business. If your site receives no traffic from these geographic areas, you do not need to implement what is described here.
Google in 2020, then Microsoft in 2023, were the first to formalize this approach as a structured and documented transmission system. The underlying movement is clear: all major measurement and online advertising platforms must now comply with it, and it is mandatory for anyone using these services on a site receiving European visitors.
The origins of Consent Modes
The starting point is the GDPR, which came into effect in May 2018. It requires obtaining explicit user consent before collecting personal data. Measurement and advertising cookies fall fully into this category — whether they serve for analytics, conversion tracking, or remarketing.
Result: platforms faced a concrete problem. If a visitor refuses cookies, their tags stop working. For the advertiser, this translates into incomplete measurement data and campaigns optimizing in a vacuum. In European countries where refusal rates are high, a significant portion of traffic disappears from the radar.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into effect in 2023, further strengthened these obligations — particularly for large platforms designated as "gatekeepers," which include Google and Microsoft.
What is a Consent Mode?
A Consent Mode is a technical mechanism that allows a third-party service to learn a visitor's consent choice and adapt its behavior accordingly.
In practice, here's what happens:
Your visitor arrives on your site and sees your Axeptio consent banner.
They make their choice — they accept or refuse the services in question.
Axeptio transmits this choice to the relevant third-party service as a signal.
The service receives this signal and immediately adjusts its behavior: if accepted, it collects normally; if refused, it limits or stops its collection according to the Consent Mode rules.
This signal is what the Consent Mode is: a standardized line of communication between your banner and the third-party service. Without it, the service doesn't know what your visitor chose — it collects blindly or, worse, collects without authorization.
Important point: a Consent Mode does not replace your consent banner. Your banner is what collects and records consent — it's what makes you GDPR compliant. The Consent Mode is only responsible for transmitting this choice to third-party services so they respect your visitor's decision. These are two complementary mechanisms, not interchangeable ones.
Two levels of operation: basic and advanced
Google's and Microsoft's Consent Modes both offer two levels of operation.
Basic mode ensures that no data is transmitted before the visitor makes their choice — it's the strictest level of compliance. Advanced mode allows tags to load as soon as the page loads and transmit anonymized data while waiting for interaction with the banner, which can improve measurement quality, particularly for Google.
The two modes are not strictly equivalent, either between themselves or between Google and Microsoft. Technical implications, measurement benefits, and legal considerations differ depending on the case. Guides dedicated to each Consent Mode help you choose the mode suited to your situation.
Each platform has its own Consent Mode
There is no universal Consent Mode. Each platform has developed its own:
Google Consent Mode v2 — launched in 2020, updated in November 2023, mandatory for advertisers targeting EEA visitors since March 2024. It covers Google services: Google Analytics, Google Ads, Floodlight.
Microsoft UET Consent Mode — also called Microsoft Consent Mode, or Bing Consent Mode in older resources — launched in July 2023, mandatory since May 2025 for visitors from the EEA, United Kingdom, and Switzerland. It covers Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) and its UET tracking system.
The direct consequence: using Google Consent Mode does not exempt you from implementing Microsoft UET Consent Mode. The two systems are independent. If you use both platforms, you must configure both.
What you risk by not implementing Consent Modes
Without properly configured Consent Mode, two problems arise simultaneously.
The first concerns the consistency of your collection: without Consent Mode, your tags continue to function independently of the choices expressed in your banner — which creates a gap between what your visitors accepted and the data actually collected.
The second is operational: Google and Microsoft can disable certain features for the visitors concerned — conversion tracking, remarketing lists, automatic bid optimization.
What Axeptio manages for you
Axeptio natively handles the transmission of consent signals to the platforms you use. As soon as you add a relevant service to your banner and the corresponding Consent Mode is properly configured, Axeptio automatically communicates your visitors' choices to the right platform.
The exact configuration depends on the Consent Mode involved and how your tags are loaded on your site — notably, in basic mode, you must ensure that your tags are properly conditioned on consent.
Consult the dedicated guide to ensure everything is in place: