documentation
CookieCrumbs, explained.
CookieCrumbs is an EU-hosted consent platform: a banner your visitors decide on, a scanner that watches what actually runs on your site, and a consent log you can hand to a regulator. This documentation explains all of it.
the mental modelFour ideas, and everything hangs off them
The whole product fits in four sentences. If you hold these, every page of the dashboard will feel familiar.
- Your site is being watched. CookieCrumbs loads your pages the way a first-time visitor would, with consent denied, and tells you dated and re-runnable whether anything fired before consent. That verdict is the first thing your dashboard shows.
- Your banner is a published document. You design it, publish numbered versions, and promote from preview to production. There is no on/off toggle; publishing is the switch, and every version is kept so you can show exactly what visitors saw on any given day.
- Trackers get sorted once per vendor. The scanner files what it finds into an inbox. You decide once per company (analytics, marketing, and so on), and the sorted list becomes your public cookie list.
- Every choice becomes proof. Each visitor decision lands as a tamper-evident record, chained to the one before it, exportable with a signature a third party can verify.
quickstartFrom nothing to a proven banner
The dashboard walks you through six steps, and each tick is derived from your own data rather than from clicking "done". In outline:
- Add your site. Production and preview environments, default categories and a first draft are created for you.
- Scan it. A quick check reads your homepage in seconds and queues a full scan in a real browser.
- Sort what the scan found, one decision per vendor.
- Make the banner yours and publish, first to preview, then to production.
- Install the one script tag (or use the CLI and framework SDKs).
- Check it works. We load your page and confirm the banner runs before any tracker does.
The full walkthrough, including what each tick is derived from, is on Getting started.
the mapWhere things live
| In the dashboard | What it answers | Documented in |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Is my site compliant right now? | Getting started |
| Banner | What do visitors see, and what did each version achieve? | The banner |
| Cookies & trackers | What runs on my site, and what have I told visitors about it? | Cookies & trackers |
| Consent records | Can I prove one consent? | Consent records |
| Analytics | How do visitors decide? | Analytics |
| Site settings, Workspace | Domains, install, retention, team, billing | Teams & clients, Security & data |
Developers get their own front door: the install guide, framework SDKs, the CLI, the runtime API, the REST API, webhooks and an MCP server for coding agents.
honestyWhat CookieCrumbs is not
- It is not legal advice. The product shows you what runs on your site, blocks it until consent, and records the choices. Whether your overall setup is compliant is a judgement for you and, where needed, your counsel. The dashboard says "this is not a legal assessment" wherever a judgement could be implied, and it means it.
- It is not an IAB TCF CMP today. The scanner detects TCF signals on your pages and the tracker database knows vendors' TCF ids, but CookieCrumbs does not currently render a TCF consent string. If your advertising stack requires TCF, check before adopting.
- It does not do dark patterns. Accept and Reject are the same object in every banner design, and that is enforced by the theme system rather than left to good intentions.
Metrics that depend on the banner reporting itself (visitors, banner shown) are best-effort: ad blockers remove them. Consent records are counted from the records themselves and are exact.