start here
Getting started
Six steps take a bare domain to a working, provable consent banner. Nothing is ticked on trust: every step derives its state from real rows in your account, and the last step is the first clean verdict on your Home page.
before you beginSigning up
Create an account at app.cookiecrumbs.eu. The Free plan needs no card. A workspace is created for you automatically; sites, team members and billing all live inside it. The first thing the app asks for is your site's domain, and everything after that happens inside the dashboard.
the journeyThe six steps, and what each tick means
Until your banner is live and proven, the Home page is the set-up journey itself. It first asks how you want to do it: click through the steps in the dashboard, run them from the terminal with the CLI, or hand them to a coding agent through the MCP server. Whichever you pick, the same steps tick themselves from real data, so you can switch at any time. In the dashboard each step embeds the real controls, so you never leave the page to hunt for a form. The ticks are derived, never asserted:
| Step | What you do | The tick is derived from |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Add your site | Give the domain. Production and preview environments, default categories and a first banner draft are created. | The site exists. |
| 2. Scan your site | Run the quick check, which also queues a full scan. | A scan has finished. |
| 3. Sort what it found | File each vendor the scan discovered under a category. | No tracker is left unfiled. |
| 4. Publish your banner | Adjust the design and words, then publish to production. | A production version exists. |
| 5. Install the snippet | Put one script tag first in your page's head. | The snippet has phoned home from your site. |
| 6. Check it's working | We load your page like a visitor and verify the banner runs before any tracker. | The install check passed, or a real visitor decision has been recorded. A real decision is the strongest proof there is, so it also completes this step. |
When steps four and six are both done, the journey disappears for good and Home becomes your monitor. Scanning and sorting carry on for the life of the site; new findings reopen the monitor's "needs attention" list, never the set-up journey.
scanningQuick check and full scan
The quick check reads your homepage over plain HTTP in a few seconds: which consent banner is already there (it recognises the common ones), which tag managers, which trackers. It also queues a full scan, which loads up to ten pages in a real browser as a first-time visitor with consent denied, and records every cookie, script, pixel, iframe and storage key it meets. The full scan is the source of the verdict, the tracker inbox and the issues list. You can re-run the quick check at any time from Home ("check my site now").
Scans of unverified domains are limited to a shallow, passive check. Verifying the domain (Site settings, General) unlocks full scans and alerts.
preview and productionTwo documents, not a toggle
Your banner exists twice: a preview draft you can publish and look at safely, and the production document your visitors see. Each environment has its own key in the install snippet, so you can put the preview key on a staging site (or on your live site while testing) without touching visitors. Publishing to preview is step zero of making it yours; promoting to production is the moment the banner goes live. Both are covered in detail on the banner page.
the checkProving it works
The install check loads your page in a real browser, accepts once, and reports what it actually saw: the snippet present and first in the head, Consent Mode defaults set before any tag, the banner rendered, the consent cookie written after accepting. Every result is a plain sentence with a next action, and there is no branch that guesses. A missing check is not a pass, and the dashboard says so.
Once the check passes (or a real visitor records a decision), Home switches to the monitor: a dated verdict reading either "Nothing fired before consent." or naming exactly which vendors fired early, each with a block action. That verdict, kept fresh by scheduled scans, is the product's core promise working.