Consent experience

The cookie consent banner,
and everything behind it

A cookie consent banner is the notice that asks visitors whether your site may use non-essential cookies. Kukie's banner offers four layouts, per-category and per-service toggles, and accept and reject buttons of equal prominence. Every choice is applied immediately to the scripts on the page and stored as a dated record.

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Why the banner is the part regulators actually look at

Almost every privacy complaint that reaches a supervisory authority about a website starts with something visible: a banner that only offered "Accept", a banner that set tracking cookies before anyone clicked anything, or no banner at all. The parts of compliance nobody can see rarely trigger the first letter. The banner does, because it is the one piece a member of the public can screenshot.

No banner at all

Analytics and advertising cookies are set on first page load, before the visitor has agreed to anything. This is the single most common finding in cookie enforcement actions, and it is trivially verifiable by anyone with a browser.

A banner that only accepts

If refusing takes three clicks and accepting takes one, regulators in several EU states have held that the consent collected is not freely given - which means the cookies were set without a valid legal basis, banner or no banner.

A banner that does not block

The most expensive failure mode, because it looks fine. The banner appears, the visitor clicks reject, and the tags fire anyway because nothing was ever wired to the answer. You can check this yourself in your browser's developer tools.

Kukie provides the technical infrastructure for cookie consent management. Whether your site is compliant depends on how you configure it and may require additional legal measures specific to your organisation. If you want to see where you currently stand, the free GDPR compliance scanner grades a public page against the common failure modes above.

How consent works, from first visit to stored record

You add one line of script to your site. Everything below happens without further work on your part.

Trackers are held back

Before the banner is even visible, Kukie recognises known tracking scripts on the page and prevents them running. Nothing is measured, and no advertising cookie is written, until there is an answer.

The visitor decides

The banner appears in the language of the visitor's browser, with accept and reject side by side. Opening preferences reveals the categories, and within them the individual services, each of which can be allowed or refused on its own.

The answer takes effect and is recorded

Allowed scripts run immediately, refused ones stay blocked, and Google Consent Mode v2 signals go out. The decision is stored with a receipt identifier you can look up later.

Which banner layout should you use?

Kukie offers four. They differ in how much of the page they cover and how hard they are to ignore, which is a trade-off between consent rates and first impressions. All four carry the same controls.

Comparison of the four Kukie cookie banner layouts
Layout	Where it sits	Blocks the page	Suits
Popup	Centred over the page	Yes, with an optional overlay	Sites where an explicit decision matters more than an uninterrupted first view
Top bar	Full width, above the content	No	Content and publishing sites, where pushing the article down is acceptable but hiding it is not
Bottom bar	Full width, below the content	No	The most common choice: visible, but leaves the top of the page alone
Floating	A card in a corner you choose	No	Marketing sites and product pages where the hero image is the point

You can switch between all four in the editor and watch the change in a live preview before anything reaches your visitors. Colours, typography and your own logo are covered on the customisation page.

What your visitors actually see

Most people see the banner once, click one of two buttons and never think about it again. The detail below is for the minority who open the preferences panel, and for the regulator who eventually asks what that panel offered.

Accept and reject, equally weighted. Same size, same styling, same position. This is the CNIL equal-prominence expectation, and it is the default rather than a setting you have to find.
Categories, then individual services. A visitor can allow analytics but refuse marketing, or go a level deeper and allow one analytics tool while refusing another. Nothing is pre-ticked.
Their own language. The banner reads the browser language and translates itself, including right-to-left layouts for Arabic and Hebrew. You write your text once.
A way back. An optional re-open control sits in a corner of every page so consent can be changed or withdrawn later, which is a requirement, not a nicety.
One decision across your subdomains. Consent given on your main site can carry across every subdomain on the same domain, so a visitor is not asked again at the shop or the help centre.

And on your side

You write the text once: Heading, body, button labels. Translation is automatic from there.
You choose what counts as what: Each cookie and script sits in a category. A scan proposes the categories; you have the final say.
You set how long consent lasts: Per site, with re-consent when the period runs out.
You can see every answer: Each decision is stored with a receipt identifier and can be exported. See consent analytics and records.

When the banner matters most

Every site that uses non-essential cookies needs one. These are the situations where getting it right early saves the most work later.

You have visitors in more than one country

EU visitors have to opt in; Californian visitors have to be able to opt out; some jurisdictions only require notice. One banner can behave differently for each - see geo-targeting.

You run advertising

Ad platforms increasingly require a consent signal before they will accept European traffic at all. Kukie sends Google Consent Mode v2 and Amazon Consent Signal automatically.

You embed other people's content

A YouTube player or a map is a third-party tracker with pictures. Those are handled by iFrame blocking rather than by the banner alone.

Somebody else will inherit the site

A banner nobody can explain is a liability. Stored records, a written cookie policy and an audit trail mean the next person can answer questions without archaeology.

The banner is included on every plan, including the free one. Compare plans if you need more sites, longer consent retention or your own logo in the banner.

Related features

The banner is one part of the consent flow. These are the pieces it works with most closely.

Customisation

Colours, CSS, logo and RTL

Accessibility

Built to WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines

Geo-targeting

The right banner in every region

See the full feature set

Cookie banner questions

The questions site owners ask most often before they set one up.

Does my website need a cookie consent banner?

If your site sets any cookie that is not strictly necessary to deliver the page - analytics, advertising, embedded video, live chat, A/B testing - then in the EU, the UK and a growing number of other jurisdictions you need to ask permission before those cookies are set. A site that sets only its own session and security cookies generally does not. The safest way to find out which group you are in is to scan the site and look at what actually loads.

What has to be on a cookie consent banner?

Broadly: what you are asking for, who is asking, what the cookies are used for, and a genuine choice. Under GDPR that choice has to be as easy to refuse as to give, which in practice means a reject option next to the accept option rather than buried behind a settings screen. Regulators also expect the banner to name the categories of cookies in use and to link to a fuller cookie policy.

Do I need a reject button as well as an accept button?

In the EU, yes in practice. The French regulator CNIL and several of its counterparts have taken enforcement action over banners where accepting took one click and refusing took several, on the basis that consent obtained that way is not freely given. Kukie renders accept and reject at the same size, in the same style, at the same level of the banner by default.

What happens to my analytics when someone rejects cookies?

You stop receiving cookie-based measurement from that visitor, so session counts fall. How far depends on your audience and how the banner is written. If you use Google Analytics or Google Ads, Google Consent Mode v2 lets Google keep receiving cookieless signals from visitors who declined, which it uses to model some of the missing conversions. Kukie sends those signals automatically.

How long does consent last before I have to ask again?

You set it. Kukie stores the visitor decision for a period you configure per site, and re-asks once it expires. Many EU operators settle on six to twelve months, which is the range several supervisory authorities have pointed to as reasonable, but the correct answer for your site is a decision for whoever owns your privacy compliance.

Can visitors change their mind after they have accepted?

Yes, and they must be able to. Kukie can show a small persistent re-open control on every page, in one of four corner positions and three styles, so a visitor can reopen the preferences panel and change or withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing is recorded the same way granting is.

Put a compliant banner on your site today

Free plan, no card required. One line of script and the banner is live.

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