Consent cookie & events

Reference for wiring your own code — or Google Tag Manager — to the visitor's consent decision. Use this when the Consent Mode toggles and category gating don't cover what you need.

Consent events

The banner dispatches these on window as CustomEvents:

Event	Fires when
cc:onFirstConsent	the visitor makes their first-ever choice
cc:onConsent	on first consent and on every page load with a stored choice
cc:onChange	the visitor changes an existing choice
cc:onModalShow / cc:onModalHide	the banner or preferences modal opens / closes

For gating a tag, cc:onConsent (does the visitor consent now, including on return visits) plus cc:onChange (they just changed their mind) is the pair you want.

Payload

window.addEventListener('cc:onConsent', (e) => {
  e.detail.cookie.categories   // e.g. ['necessary', 'analytics']
  e.detail.cookie.consentId    // stable random visitor id
  e.detail.cookie.consentTimestamp
})

window.addEventListener('cc:onChange', (e) => {
  e.detail.cookie.categories       // the full current set
  e.detail.changedCategories       // just what flipped this time
})

categories is the array to check. The standard keys are necessary, preferences, analytics and marketing; a site may define others.

Example: gate your own SDK

let started = false

function sync(categories) {
  const wanted = categories.includes('analytics')
  if (wanted && !started) { startAnalyticsSdk(); started = true }
  if (!wanted && started) { stopAnalyticsSdk(); started = false }
}

window.addEventListener('cc:onConsent', (e) => sync(e.detail.cookie.categories))
window.addEventListener('cc:onChange', (e) => sync(e.detail.cookie.categories))

The consent cookie

The visitor's decision is stored in a first-party cookie named cw_consent, URL-encoded JSON:

{
  "categories": ["necessary", "analytics"],
  "consentId": "a1b2c3d4-…",
  "revision": 0,
  "consentTimestamp": "2026-07-26T10:00:00.000Z",
  "lastConsentTimestamp": "2026-07-26T10:00:00.000Z",
  "languageCode": "en"
}

Read it server-side, or from a tag manager, to branch on consent without listening for an event.

Google Tag Manager

Two ways to fire a non-Google tag on consent:

Custom Event trigger. In GTM, create a Custom Event trigger with the event name cc:onChange (enable regex matching if you also want cc:onConsent). Bind your tag to it. GTM's dataLayer does not receive these by default, so push them yourself in a small bootstrap:

window.addEventListener('cc:onConsent', (e) =>
  dataLayer.push({ event: 'cc:onConsent', cwCategories: e.detail.cookie.categories }))
window.addEventListener('cc:onChange', (e) =>
  dataLayer.push({ event: 'cc:onChange', cwCategories: e.detail.cookie.categories }))

1st-party cookie variable. Create a GTM 1st-Party Cookie variable reading cw_consent, and check whether it contains the category you need in your trigger condition.

For Google tags specifically you need neither — turn on the Google Consent Mode toggle and GTM gates them natively.