Consent Debugger

The Consent Debugger loads one page of your live site as a first-time EU visitor and shows everything that happens before the visitor chooses: scripts, consent signals, cookie writes and tag requests. It loads the page with the same browser as the cookie scan and judges it with the same checks as the Compliance Copilot and the Compliance Report, so a page gets the same findings everywhere.

This is a Pro+ feature.

How to access

1. Open your site in the CookieBoss dashboard
2. Navigate to the Site Detail page
3. Find the Consent Debugger card
4. Pick a page (your homepage is selected; pages from recent scans are listed, or enter another page on your site) and click Analyze

What it captures

The debugger records these events before any consent choice:

Script load order and timing

Every script that loads on your page is logged with its source URL and exact timing. This reveals whether the CookieBoss consent script loads before third-party tags — which is essential for proper blocking.

Consent signal events

All gtag('consent', ...) calls are captured, including:

• Consent defaults — the initial denied state set by the consent script
• Consent updates — the granted state after visitor consent

Cookie writes

Cookies set during page load are tracked with timestamps, showing which cookies are written before consent and which are written after. This is the most direct way to detect pre-consent tracking.

Tag and pixel fires

Network requests to known analytics and advertising endpoints are detected, including:

• Google Analytics (google-analytics.com)
• Google Ads (googleads.g.doubleclick.net)
• Facebook Pixel (facebook.com/tr)
• Other common tracking pixels

Consent calls through the dataLayer

Consent calls that go through dataLayer.push(), including the standard gtag() snippet and Google Tag Manager, are captured like direct gtag('consent', ...) calls.

Timeline view

The debugger presents events on a color-coded timeline:

Color	Event type
Green	Consent events (defaults, updates)
Red	Violations (scripts or cookies firing before consent)
Blue	Network requests (tag/pixel fires)
Orange	Cookie writes

Events are ordered chronologically with millisecond timestamps, so you can see the exact sequence of operations during page load.

Findings

Next to the timeline, the debugger lists the findings for the page, the same list the Compliance Copilot shows: cookies, storage, trackers or fingerprinting before consent, a missing banner, and problems with the published banner settings. Each finding names the rule it rests on and links to its fix.

Tag requests in the timeline are marked as warnings until a consent update grants consent.

How to use the results

1. No problems on this page: nothing non-necessary happened before consent.
2. Findings: work through them from the top. Each one links to where you fix it. Then analyze the page again.