See who your cookies report to COOKIEAUDIT
Paste your cookies and COOKIEAUDIT sorts each one into advertising, analytics, functional or unknown, so you can see how much of a page is watching versus working. Only the names are read, in your browser.
From your browser's dev tools (Application, then Cookies), or paste a Cookie or Set-Cookie header or a cookies.json export.
How it works
How a cookie gets sorted, and why that is a guess
This reads the names. It does not read the values, it does not
contact anything, and it does not open any page. Names are matched against
the ones the large advertising, analytics and consent platforms are known
to set: _ga and _gid for Google Analytics,
_fbp for Meta's pixel, IDE and
test_cookie for DoubleClick, _gcl_au for Google
Ads conversion linking, OptanonConsent for OneTrust.
That is a heuristic and it is worth knowing where it is wrong in each direction. A site can name an advertising cookie anything it likes, so a tracker under a house name lands in unknown. And a name that matches a known pattern might have been set by a different product entirely. Unknown is not a clean bill of health; it means the name told us nothing.
What the sort is actually for
The useful output is not the label on any one row. It is the shape of the whole list: how many cookies a page sets before you agree to anything, how many are advertising rather than functional, and how many come from domains that are not the one in your address bar.
Two things are worth checking against what the site told you. If the banner said "we only use essential cookies" and the list is full of advertising ones, the banner is wrong. And if advertising cookies are already set before you press accept, that is the finding: in the UK and the EU, non-essential cookies set before consent are the thing the rules are actually about.
Reading them out of your own browser
Open developer tools, go to Application (Storage in Firefox), then
Cookies, and choose the site. You can copy the rows straight out and paste
them here; a Cookie request header or a
Set-Cookie response header works too.
Worth doing twice: once in a normal window and once in a private one before accepting anything. The difference between the two lists is what the site sets without being asked. POLICYLENS will then tell you what the privacy policy claims, which is sometimes a different story, and FINGERPRINT shows what a site can recognise you by when it sets no cookie at all.
Doing this often? The OBSCURA Sovereign Suite checks what this browser lets every site read without asking, and what to change. On its own, US$4 a month; with everything else, US$9 a month or US$79 a year. 7 days free.