For Google, the Cookieless Future Becomes a Thing of the Past

The cookieless* future …*now with more cookies!

After more than four years of steadfast commitment to the deprecation of third-party cookies (3PC) in its market-leading Chrome web browser, Google surprised the digital marketing industry Monday with a pivot that instead proposes to put users in control.

In an official blog post, the company announced plans to “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing”, effectively ending its plans to phase out the use of third-party cookies anytime soon. Google had previously delayed deprecation three times, most recently to early 2025, causing some analysts to wonder if the delays would eventually become permanent. Even so, this week’s announcement means continued fragmentation and uncertainty for a media targeting and measurement landscape already heavily disrupted by privacy regulations, technology changes, and consumer attitudes toward data sharing.

While many brands and publishers likely feel some sense of relief, Google’s proposal is so far light on details and has yet to be reviewed by regulators, making Google’s – and the industry’s – path ahead far from settled. In the same post, Google committed to continuing to develop its Privacy Sandbox technologies, the suite of solutions it has spent the last few years testing as a third-party cookie replacement. 

Even as third-party cookies remain in place for Chrome, the central challenge for the industry remains: rebuilding the digital ad ecosystem in a way that balances the needs of publishers, advertisers, adtech companies, consumers, and regulators.

Looking ahead: What this means for marketers

Consumer data privacy concerns will cause cookies’ eventual demise. Third-party cookies are likely still on their way out, even though the timeline has been significantly extended. By putting the choice of whether to use 3PC-based tracking in Chrome users’ hands, Google has made third-party cookie signal loss a data privacy issue rather than a technology one.

Cookie-based signals will continue to dim. As users make an “informed choice” to opt-out of cookie-based tracking in Chrome’s browser controls, signal loss will continue to increase. If Google’s Chrome 3PC opt-out rate proves to be anything like what app developers experienced after Apple’s roll out of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) in 2021, third-party cookies’ value will drop quickly. Consent management platforms and U.S. state-level requirements to respect a browser-based Global Privacy Control were already beginning to push the industry in this direction; we anticipate Google’s change to further amplify the opt-out trend affecting brands’ ability to collect and activate on digital data.

Cookieless solutions will continue to emerge. The digital marketing industry has invested years creating, testing, and critiquing cookieless alternatives like Privacy Sandbox, Unified ID 2.0, conversion APIs, and a resurgence of new-era contextual advertising. Likewise, brands have been focused on creating a robust first-party data strategy, testing new activation tactics, and adopting new measurement approaches. This work will continue to evolve over time, creating new addressability and measurement strategies that are not cookie-reliant.

Transformation remains the only path forward. Third-party cookie deprecation has always been just one component of data deprecation. Data privacy is, and will continue to be, the leading driver of an industry disruption that will continue to force brands to pivot away from long-time methods for data activation and measurement toward solutions that balance user privacy with performance.

Don’t allow the near-term availability of third-party cookies to be a deciding factor in your organization’s decision to experiment (or not) with new marketing methodologies. Market-leading brands will continue to test and adopt future-focused, privacy-integrated technologies and strategies to drive business outcomes while staying ahead of a rapidly shifting privacy landscape, while laggards will cling to the status quo.