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What is a good cookie consent rate?

By The ConsentLift team · published · updated

It's one of the first questions a client asks once they see the number. The honest answer starts with a question back: which rate?

First, which rate are you looking at?

There are two common ways to express the same result, and they can sit 20 points apart:

  • the consent rate divides acceptances by the visitors who made a choice;
  • the opt-in rate divides acceptances by every banner shown, including the ones nobody answered.

A 78% consent rate and a 56% opt-in rate can describe exactly the same visitors. Our article on opt-in rate vs consent rate goes through the arithmetic. Before comparing anything, make sure both numbers use the same denominator.

What the published figures say

The most detailed public source is Didomi's 2026 study of 2025 data, the only one that publishes the consent rate, the opt-in rate and the "no choice" share side by side.

By region (Europe).

RegionConsent rateOpt-in rate
Eastern Europe89.3%67.6%
British Isles87.3%about 63% (our calculation)
Northern Europe84.8%n/a
Southern Europe82.5%n/a
Western Europe75.1%55.7%

The British Isles figure needs a second look. The consent rate is among the highest in Europe, but the region also has the highest "no choice" share in the study, 27.4%. More than a quarter of UK and Irish visitors leave the banner unanswered. Applying the consent rate to the visitors who do answer gives an opt-in rate of roughly 63%: a very different picture from the 87% headline. (That calculation is ours; Didomi doesn't publish the British Isles opt-in rate in the sources we read.)

By industry (16 European sectors). Consent rates run from 69.6% (energy and utilities) to 82.7% (media and publishers). Opt-in rates run from 49.8% (high tech and telecoms) to 64.4% (media). The "no choice" share runs from 22.6% to 35.1%.

Why your number may not compare

Even with the right denominator, a benchmark is a rough guide:

  • It describes one vendor's clients, not the web as a whole. Sites that pay for a performance-oriented CMP are not an average sample.
  • None of the public sources say how bots are handled. Bots see the banner and never click, which lowers the opt-in rate but leaves the consent rate untouched.
  • Industry and device matter more than the overall average. A B2B site and a media site are not playing the same game.
  • A partial acceptance (analytics only, say) counts as an acceptance in some tools and not in others.

So a site at 74% where the benchmark says 78% has learned nothing: the gap is smaller than the differences in method. A site at 45% consent rate, on the other hand, is well below anything published and deserves an audit.

The more useful test: your decision rate

Instead of asking whether your rate is good, ask where you lose people. The decision rate, the share of banners that get any answer at all, splits the problem in two:

opt-in rate = decision rate × consent rate

Across Didomi's regions and industries, between about 65% and 78% of banners get an answer. If your decision rate is well below that range, the issue is probably not the wording but the display: the banner appears late, sits off-screen on mobile, is covered by a newsletter popup, or doesn't work on one browser. Break it down by browser and device: a drop on a single segment is almost always technical.

If the decision rate is normal and the consent rate is low, then it's the message: the wording, the button order, how the categories are explained.

What "good" should mean for a client

A target number is the wrong goal. Regulators, the ICO and the CNIL among them, expect rejecting to be as easy as accepting, and a banner tuned to squeeze out a few extra points by hiding the reject button is a risk, not an achievement.

A better definition of good:

  1. No consent lost for a technical reason. Every browser, every device, every page shows the banner and lets people answer.
  2. A stable, comparable measurement. The same definition month after month, whatever CMP the client uses, so that a change is visible when it happens.
  3. Every banner change dated and measured. A redesign or a CMP migration compared before and after, with the same method on both sides.

That's what a client can actually act on. It is also what we built ConsentLift to measure, and what our agencies page describes for teams handling several clients on several CMPs.

FAQ

Is 60% a good cookie consent rate? If it's a consent rate, it's below every regional and industry average Didomi publishes: worth an audit. If it's an opt-in rate, it's within the published range for most industries.

Why does my CMP show a higher rate than my analytics? Your CMP probably shows a consent rate, which excludes unanswered banners. Your analytics only sees visitors who allowed it, out of all visitors: closer to an opt-in rate. Different denominators.

Does Google's modelling make up the difference? Only above thresholds: at least 1,000 events a day with analytics denied for at least 7 days, and at least 1,000 users a day who granted it, on at least 7 of the previous 28 days. Below that, nothing is modelled.

Sources