Last updated: February 10, 2026
If you have been following the third-party cookie saga since Google first announced deprecation plans in 2020, you would be forgiven for having whiplash. The timeline shifted from 2022 to 2023 to 2024 to 2025, and then Google scrapped the whole thing entirely. Privacy Sandbox APIs were built, tested, debated, partially adopted, and then largely retired. Meanwhile, Safari and Firefox quietly blocked third-party cookies years ago, and roughly half the web has been operating in a cookieless environment this entire time.
For Google Ads advertisers, the noise around cookie deprecation has created a dangerous paradox. Some businesses over-invested in preparing for a cookieless future that never arrived on Chrome. Others tuned out the privacy conversation entirely and are now caught off guard by the very real data signal degradation happening across browsers, consent regulations, and user behavior regardless of what Chrome does with cookies.
The truth, as usual, sits somewhere between the extremes. Third-party cookies are not dead. But they are also not healthy. And the practical impact on your Google Ads campaigns in 2026 is significant enough that ignoring it is costing you money, whether you realize it or not.
This article cuts through six years of contradictory announcements to tell you exactly where things stand right now, which privacy technologies actually matter for your advertising, what has changed about targeting and measurement in practice, and what you should be doing about it today.
Understanding where we are requires understanding how we got here. The cookie deprecation story is one of the messiest technology policy sagas in recent memory, and the twists matter because they reveal what Google's actual priorities are (and are not).
Google announced it would phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. The stated goal was to improve user privacy while maintaining an ad-supported web. The Privacy Sandbox initiative launched to develop alternative technologies.
The deadline slipped to 2023, then 2024. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation into whether removing cookies would give Google's ad products an unfair advantage. Google secured commitments with the CMA to address competition concerns. Privacy Sandbox APIs reached general availability in September 2023, with Topics API, Protected Audience API, Attribution Reporting, and over 20 other technologies enabled for Chrome users.
Google disabled third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users as a real-world test. This was the closest we ever got to actual deprecation. Advertisers and publishers reported mixed results: Google's own testing showed 89% recovery in display ad spend and 97% recovery in conversions per dollar, but remarketing recovery was only 49-55%. Ad-tech company Criteo reported publishers could lose an average of 60% of their Chrome revenue. Supply-side platform Index Exchange found CPMs fell 33% when using Privacy Sandbox.
Google officially abandoned its cookie deprecation plan. Anthony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, announced that instead of removing cookies, Chrome would "introduce a new experience that lets people make an informed choice." The industry reacted with a mix of relief, frustration, and cynicism.
Google announced it would not even introduce a standalone consent prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome. No choice screen. No opt-in or opt-out prompt. Users would continue managing cookie preferences through Chrome's existing privacy settings, buried several clicks deep where most people never look.
In the biggest development that most advertisers missed entirely, Google announced the retirement of the majority of Privacy Sandbox technologies. Gone or being phased out: Topics API, Protected Audience API, Attribution Reporting API, IP Protection, Private Aggregation, Shared Storage, and several others. The only notable survivor was CHIPS (Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State), which prevents cross-site tracking through cookie partitioning.
The CMA subsequently released Google from its legally binding commitments related to third-party cookie deprecation, effectively closing the regulatory chapter.
Third-party cookies remain enabled by default in Chrome. There is no deprecation timeline. The Privacy Sandbox initiative has been largely dismantled. Chrome's Incognito mode continues to block third-party cookies. Users can manually disable cookies through settings, but the vast majority do not.
That sounds like the story is over. It is not.
Here is the critical mistake many advertisers are making right now: they heard "Google is not deprecating cookies" and concluded that nothing has changed. Everything has changed. The cookie deprecation was one threat among many, and the others have been steadily eroding your data quality regardless of what Chrome decided to do.
Safari implemented Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) years ago, blocking third-party cookies entirely and limiting first-party cookie lifespans to 7 days (or 24 hours for cookies set via JavaScript). Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection does the same. Together, Safari and Firefox represent roughly 30-35% of global browser traffic. For mobile-heavy businesses, Safari's share is even higher since it is the default browser on every iPhone and iPad.
This means that roughly one-third of your website visitors are already invisible to traditional cookie-based tracking. Their conversions are not being counted accurately. Their remarketing audiences are incomplete. Their attribution paths are broken. This has been true for years, but many advertisers have not fully reckoned with the impact because Chrome was still providing complete data for the majority of their traffic.
The European Union's GDPR and ePrivacy Directive require explicit consent before setting tracking cookies. Google's enforcement of its EU User Consent Policy, including the mandatory implementation of Consent Mode V2 starting March 2024, means that advertisers serving European users must collect and transmit consent signals for both ad measurement (ad_user_data) and personalization (ad_personalization).
Globally, only about 31% of users accept tracking cookies when presented with a compliant consent banner. In some markets, acceptance rates are even lower. This means that even in Chrome, where cookies technically work, two-thirds of your European traffic is not being tracked through traditional cookie-based methods.
In the United States, privacy regulations are expanding rapidly. California's CPRA, along with privacy laws in Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, and several other states taking effect through 2026-2027, are creating a patchwork of data collection requirements that will increasingly demand consent-based tracking even in the US market.
Approximately 32% of internet users globally use ad blockers as of 2025. Many ad blockers do not just hide ads. They also block tracking scripts, including Google's gtag.js and analytics tags. These users are completely invisible to your conversion tracking, regardless of cookie status.
Even among users who accept cookies, a significant percentage regularly clear their browser data. Each time they do, their remarketing cookie is reset. Their attribution history is erased. Their conversion path is broken. What was a single customer journey across multiple sessions becomes, from your tracking perspective, several disconnected anonymous visits.
Add these factors together. Roughly 30-35% of traffic blocked by Safari and Firefox. Another 15-20% of remaining traffic lost to ad blockers. In Europe, 69% of Chrome users declining consent. Regular cookie deletion breaking attribution paths for the rest. The total amount of user behavior that your Google Ads account can accurately track through traditional cookies is significantly less than 50% for many advertisers, and it gets worse every quarter.
This is the real privacy crisis for Google Ads advertisers. Not a dramatic single-day cookie deprecation event, but a slow, steady erosion of data quality that has been happening for years and is accelerating in 2026.
With Privacy Sandbox largely retired, the technologies that advertisers need to care about in 2026 are not the experimental APIs that Google spent five years developing and then abandoned. They are the practical, deployable solutions that address the real data gaps described above.
Consent Mode V2 is the single most important privacy technology for Google Ads advertisers in 2026. It is not optional if you serve users in the European Economic Area, and it is increasingly important even for US-only advertisers as state privacy laws expand.
Consent Mode works by communicating user consent choices to Google's tags in real time. When a user accepts tracking, everything works as before. When a user declines, Consent Mode V2 in Advanced configuration still sends anonymous, cookieless pings to Google. These pings do not contain personal data, but they do tell Google that a visit and potentially a conversion occurred. Google then uses machine learning to model the likely conversion behavior of non-consenting users based on patterns observed from consenting users.
The impact is significant. Advertisers implementing Advanced Consent Mode V2 typically see 15-25% recovery in conversion data that would otherwise be completely invisible. Smart Bidding algorithms that receive these modeled conversions make substantially better optimization decisions than algorithms operating on incomplete data.
Without Consent Mode V2, your Google Ads campaigns in Europe are optimizing based on roughly 31% of actual user behavior. With it, you recover a meaningful portion of the missing signal. That difference directly impacts your CPA, ROAS, and campaign efficiency.
Enhanced Conversions is Google's solution for recovering conversion data that is lost when cookies are blocked, deleted, or expired. The mechanism is straightforward: when a user converts on your website (submits a form, completes a purchase), Enhanced Conversions captures first-party data the user provided (email address, phone number, name) and sends it to Google in a hashed, privacy-safe format. Google then matches this hashed data against its own database of logged-in Google users to attribute the conversion, even if the original cookie is gone.
This is particularly powerful for the Safari and Firefox problem. A user clicks your ad on Monday, browses your site on Wednesday, and converts on Saturday. On Safari, the tracking cookie may have been deleted or limited to 24 hours. Without Enhanced Conversions, that conversion disappears. With Enhanced Conversions, the email address the user entered during checkout allows Google to attribute the conversion back to the original ad click.
Most advertisers report 5-25% additional conversion visibility after implementing Enhanced Conversions. Automatic collection (where Google detects and hashes form field data automatically) takes roughly 10 minutes to set up. It is one of the highest-ROI technical implementations any advertiser can make in 2026.
Server-side tagging moves your tracking from the user's browser (where it is subject to ad blockers, cookie restrictions, and browser privacy features) to your own server. Instead of JavaScript tags executing on the client side, data is collected by your server and sent to Google's measurement endpoints directly.
The advantages are substantial. Ad blockers cannot block server-side requests because they appear as first-party server communication. Cookie lifespans can be extended beyond Safari's 7-day limit. Data accuracy improves by 10-30% compared to client-side-only implementation. And you gain more control over what data is collected and transmitted.
The downside is complexity. Server-side tagging requires a Google Tag Manager Server Container, which runs on Google Cloud Platform (or another hosting provider). Setup is more technical than standard tag deployment, and ongoing costs for server hosting typically run $100-300 per month depending on traffic volume.
For advertisers spending more than $10,000 per month on Google Ads, the ROI on server-side tagging is almost always positive. The additional conversion data recovered translates directly into better Smart Bidding performance and lower effective CPAs.
Google Tag Gateway, introduced in 2025, is Google's managed version of server-side tagging designed for advertisers who want the benefits without the infrastructure management. Google's internal data shows advertisers who configured Tag Gateway saw a 14% uplift in signals, which directly feeds better conversion modeling and bid optimization.
Tag Gateway sits between your website and Google's servers, routing measurement data through a first-party domain. This extends cookie lifespans, resists ad-blocker interference, and improves data quality with minimal configuration compared to building your own server-side container.
Google's Data Manager, launched in 2025, centralizes all your first-party data sources (CRM, website, app, offline conversions) into a single, privacy-safe hub. This is not a quick-fix technology. It is an infrastructure investment that becomes more valuable over time as third-party data signals continue to degrade.
Customer Match allows you to upload hashed customer lists to Google Ads for targeting and exclusion. Offline Conversion Imports let you send CRM data back to Google so that Smart Bidding can optimize toward actual revenue, not just form submissions. Enhanced Conversions for Leads extends conversion tracking beyond the initial lead to downstream events like sales qualification and closed deals.
Every one of these solutions uses first-party data that your business collects directly from customers. Unlike third-party cookies, this data does not depend on browser settings, consent banners, or cookie policies. It is yours, it is durable, and it becomes the foundation of effective Google Ads management as other signals erode.
Let us translate all of this privacy technology into concrete impacts on the three things Google Ads advertisers care about most: targeting, remarketing, and conversion tracking.
Interest-based targeting that relied on third-party cookies (particularly for Display and YouTube campaigns) has been degrading for years. With Privacy Sandbox's Topics API now retired, there is no browser-level replacement for the interest signals that third-party cookies provided.
In practice, Google has been compensating by leaning harder on its own first-party signals: logged-in Google user behavior, Search query history, YouTube watch history, Maps usage, and Gmail interactions. These signals are not affected by cookie policies because they come from Google's own platforms where users are typically logged in.
For Google Ads advertisers, this means that Google's automated targeting systems (Performance Max's audience signals, AI Max for Search's keywordless targeting, and Smart Bidding's auction-time signals) are becoming relatively more powerful compared to manual audience targeting. They have access to Google's first-party data that you cannot access through any third-party cookie or audience platform.
The practical action: lean into Google's AI-driven targeting rather than fighting it. Provide strong audience signals in PMax, use broad match with Smart Bidding in Search campaigns, and invest in building your own first-party audiences through Customer Match and website remarketing lists that use first-party cookies.
Remarketing has been the hardest-hit capability. Cookie-based remarketing audiences have been shrinking steadily as Safari/Firefox blocking, ad blockers, and consent declines remove users from your audience lists. The Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API was supposed to provide a privacy-safe alternative for remarketing, but with its retirement, no browser-level replacement exists.
Google's solution is Customer Match and first-party audience building. Upload your customer email lists. Implement Enhanced Conversions to capture more first-party data. Use Google Ads' first-party audience tools (website visitors, YouTube viewers, app users) which rely on Google's own login-based identification rather than third-party cookies.
For Performance Max campaigns specifically, audience signals now serve as directional guidance rather than strict targeting constraints. Google's algorithm uses your audience signals as a starting point but will expand beyond them if it identifies high-probability conversions elsewhere. This is partly a feature and partly a workaround for shrinking cookie-based audiences.
If you are running Google Ads in 2026 and your conversion data looks complete and clean, one of two things is true: either you have implemented every privacy-preserving measurement tool available, or your data is wrong and you do not know it.
Google's conversion reporting now relies heavily on conversion modeling, the machine learning process that estimates conversions from users who could not be tracked directly. Consent Mode V2's Advanced configuration provides the anonymous pings that fuel this modeling. Enhanced Conversions provides hashed first-party data that closes attribution gaps. Server-side tagging extends the window in which cookies remain valid.
Without these technologies, your reported conversions represent a shrinking fraction of actual conversions. Smart Bidding optimizes toward this incomplete data, making systematically worse decisions because it does not know about the conversions it cannot see. The result is higher CPAs, missed optimization opportunities, and campaigns that underperform their potential.
With these technologies properly implemented, you recover the vast majority of lost signal. Google's own experiments showed 97% recovery in conversions per dollar when Privacy Sandbox APIs and other privacy-preserving signals were combined. While the Privacy Sandbox APIs have since been retired, the combination of Consent Mode V2, Enhanced Conversions, and server-side tagging achieves a similar level of signal recovery through different mechanisms.
Here is the concrete action plan, prioritized by impact and effort.
If you serve any users in the EEA or UK, this is mandatory. If you are US-only, it is strongly recommended as state privacy laws expand. Use a Google-certified Consent Management Platform to deploy a compliant cookie banner. Ensure it is configured in Advanced mode (not Basic mode) so that anonymous pings are sent to Google even when users decline consent.
Verify implementation using Google Tag Assistant. Check that consent signals default to "denied" before user interaction and update correctly when users make choices. Confirm that both ad_user_data and ad_personalization parameters are being transmitted.
Expected impact: 15-25% recovery in conversion visibility for traffic that declines consent.
In your Google Ads account, go to Goals, then Conversions. Select your primary conversion action, edit settings, and under Enhanced Conversions, select "Automatic." Google will detect and hash email fields on your conversion pages automatically.
For manual implementation with more control, use the global site tag to send hashed first-party data with conversion events. This takes 1-2 hours for a developer to implement and produces higher match rates than automatic collection.
Expected impact: 5-25% additional conversion visibility, particularly for Safari and Firefox traffic.
Review every conversion action in your Google Ads account. Ensure you are tracking actual business outcomes (purchases, qualified form submissions, phone calls with minimum duration) rather than proxy events (page views, button clicks). Assign conversion values to different actions so that Smart Bidding can prioritize high-value events over low-value ones.
Implement offline conversion imports if you have a sales pipeline where the actual revenue event happens after the initial lead. This is the single most impactful thing a B2B or high-consideration B2C advertiser can do: it tells Smart Bidding which leads actually turned into revenue, so it can find more people like them.
Expected impact: Varies enormously but often 20-40% improvement in lead quality for businesses that were previously optimizing only toward top-of-funnel conversions.
For advertisers spending more than $10,000 per month, server-side tagging provides measurable ROI through improved data accuracy. Set up a Google Tag Manager Server Container on Google Cloud Platform. Route your measurement tags through this server. Extend first-party cookie lifespans beyond browser-imposed limits.
Alternatively, evaluate Google Tag Gateway as a managed option with lower setup complexity.
Expected impact: 10-30% improvement in data accuracy, with compound benefits for Smart Bidding performance over time.
Connect your CRM to Google Ads through Customer Match. Set up offline conversion imports. Implement Google's Data Manager to centralize your data sources. Build website visitor audiences using first-party cookies. Create and maintain email lists that can be uploaded for targeting and exclusion.
This is not a one-time project. It is an ongoing discipline of collecting, organizing, and activating first-party data. But it is the only truly durable signal source in a world where every other data signal is subject to browser policies, consent regulations, and user behavior that you do not control.
Everything we have described so far, the Consent Mode implementation, Enhanced Conversions setup, server-side tagging evaluation, conversion tracking audits, first-party data strategy, represents a significant amount of work. And it is not one-time work. Privacy regulations change. Google updates its measurement tools. Browser policies evolve. New consent requirements emerge. The technical infrastructure needs ongoing monitoring and adjustment.
This is where the gap between manual management and autonomous AI becomes particularly stark.
A human PPC manager or agency needs to proactively stay informed about privacy changes, understand the technical implications, evaluate which solutions to implement, coordinate with developers for implementation, and continuously monitor that everything is working correctly. Given that many agencies and in-house marketers are already stretched thin managing day-to-day campaign optimization, privacy infrastructure often falls to the bottom of the priority list until something breaks.
groas approaches the privacy challenge as an inherent part of campaign management, not a separate project. Because it operates as an autonomous AI agent managing your entire Google Ads operation, privacy signal optimization is woven into its continuous optimization process.
When consent rates shift, groas automatically adjusts bidding strategies to account for changes in conversion visibility. When browser updates modify cookie behavior, the platform adapts its measurement interpretation without waiting for a human to notice the discrepancy. When Google releases new measurement features (like the Enhanced Conversions improvements or Data Manager integrations that rolled out in 2025), groas incorporates them into its optimization framework as part of its standard operation.
More fundamentally, groas optimizes toward your actual business outcomes using every available signal, whether that signal comes from traditional cookies, modeled conversions, first-party data matches, or offline conversion imports. It does not treat privacy-impacted data as a problem to be worked around. It treats it as one set of signals among many, weighting and combining them to form the most accurate picture of campaign performance possible.
This matters because the advertisers who will win in 2026 and beyond are not the ones who implement the most privacy technologies. They are the ones whose optimization systems can extract the most accurate signal from an increasingly noisy, fragmented, and incomplete data environment. An autonomous AI that processes every available data point continuously has a structural advantage over human managers who review data weekly or monthly and may not notice privacy-related signal degradation until it has already impacted performance for weeks.
The privacy landscape will keep changing. Chrome may eventually introduce new privacy features. More US states will pass privacy laws. Consent requirements will tighten. New measurement APIs will emerge. The only constant is that the data environment will become more complex, not less. Having an optimization system that adapts to these changes automatically, rather than requiring manual intervention for each shift, is not a luxury. It is becoming a competitive necessity.
No. Google officially abandoned its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome in July 2024. In April 2025, Google further confirmed it would not even introduce a consent prompt for cookies. Third-party cookies remain enabled by default in Chrome as of February 2026. Users can disable them manually through Chrome's privacy settings, and they remain blocked in Incognito mode, but there is no timeline for removal.
Google retired the majority of Privacy Sandbox technologies in late 2025, including Topics API, Protected Audience API, Attribution Reporting API, IP Protection, and Private Aggregation. The UK CMA subsequently released Google from its binding commitments. The only notable surviving technology is CHIPS (Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State). Google cited low adoption and regulatory pressure as reasons for the retirement. For advertisers, this means the browser-level alternatives to cookies that were in development for five years will not be deployed at scale.
Because roughly 30-35% of web traffic already operates in a cookieless environment (Safari and Firefox), consent regulations mean 69% of European users decline tracking, ad blockers remove another 15-20% of users from measurement, and these trends are accelerating. Even in Chrome where cookies technically work, your actual tracking coverage is significantly less than 100%. Ignoring this gap means your conversion data is incomplete, your Smart Bidding is optimizing on partial information, and your reported performance does not reflect reality.
Consent Mode V2 is Google's system for communicating user consent choices to Google's tags. It is mandatory for advertisers serving users in the European Economic Area and strongly recommended for everyone else. In Advanced mode, it sends anonymous pings to Google even when users decline cookies, enabling conversion modeling that recovers 15-25% of otherwise invisible conversion data. Without it, your European campaigns are optimizing based on only about 31% of actual user behavior.
Enhanced Conversions send hashed first-party data (email, phone, name) to Google when a user converts. Google uses this data to match conversions to ad clicks even when cookies are blocked, deleted, or expired. This is particularly valuable for Safari and Firefox traffic where cookie lifespans are severely limited. Most advertisers see 5-25% additional conversion visibility after implementation, and automatic setup takes roughly 10 minutes.
For advertisers spending more than $10,000 per month on Google Ads, server-side tagging typically delivers positive ROI through 10-30% improved data accuracy. It bypasses ad blocker interference, extends cookie lifespans beyond browser limits, and gives you more control over data collection. Setup requires technical expertise and ongoing hosting costs of $100-300 per month. Google Tag Gateway offers a managed alternative with lower complexity. For smaller advertisers, Consent Mode V2 and Enhanced Conversions should be implemented first as they provide significant impact with less effort.
Smart Bidding optimizes based on the conversion data it receives. When privacy restrictions remove conversions from your data (because the user's cookie was blocked, their consent was denied, or their ad blocker prevented tracking), Smart Bidding does not know those conversions happened. It makes bidding decisions based on incomplete information, systematically undervaluing audiences and keywords that are actually converting. This typically results in higher CPAs and missed optimization opportunities. Implementing privacy-preserving measurement tools (Consent Mode V2, Enhanced Conversions, server-side tagging) feeds more accurate data to Smart Bidding, directly improving its performance.
Yes. As of early 2026, multiple US states have active privacy laws (California's CPRA, Virginia's VCDPA, Colorado's CPA, Connecticut's CTDPA, and others). Several more states have laws taking effect in 2026 and 2027. While these laws generally use opt-out models rather than the EU's opt-in requirement, they are establishing a trajectory toward broader consent requirements. Implementing consent infrastructure now is significantly easier and cheaper than scrambling when enforcement begins in your market.
Enable Enhanced Conversions on automatic mode and implement Advanced Consent Mode V2 with a Google-certified CMP. Together, these two actions can recover 20-50% of lost conversion data with a combined setup time of less than a day. The improvement in conversion visibility directly feeds better Smart Bidding performance, making every dollar of your ad spend work harder from the moment implementation is complete.
groas treats privacy-impacted data as an inherent feature of the optimization environment rather than a separate problem to solve. It continuously monitors conversion signal quality across browsers, devices, and consent states, automatically adjusting bid strategies and campaign settings when signal patterns shift. When Google releases measurement updates or consent requirements change, groas incorporates them into its optimization without manual intervention. Most importantly, groas optimizes across all available signals simultaneously (cookies, modeled conversions, first-party data, offline imports) to form the most complete picture of actual campaign performance, adapting in real time as the privacy landscape evolves.
