When a visitor lands on your site, our autoblocker automatically prevents certain scripts, cookies, and tracking technologies from running until the visitor gives consent. This article explains the logic behind that behaviour so you can confidently configure overrides for your own site.
What gets blocked, and why
The autoblocker identifies tracking technologies that are not required for your site to function, and blocks them before the visitor has made a consent choice. This covers scripts, cookies, pixels, and similar technologies in these categories:
- Performance and Functionality (e.g. features like embedded videos that aren't essential to the site, but may stop working without them)
- Analytics and Customization (e.g. understanding how the site is used, measuring marketing effectiveness, or personalizing the site experience)
- Advertising (e.g. making ads more relevant, preventing repeat ads, or ensuring ads display properly)
- Social networking (e.g. sharing site content through third-party social networks)
- Unclassified (cookies not yet categorized, see below)
These are only allowed to run once the visitor consents to the relevant category.
What is never blocked
Cookies classified as Essential are not blocked, regardless of consent status. These are necessary to the core functionality of the site and some of its features, such as access to secure areas.
How categorization works
Every cookie the autoblocker detects is assigned to one of six categories: Essential, Performance and Functionality, Analytics and Customization, Advertising, Social networking, or Unclassified. Blocking and unblocking then follows the visitor's choice for that category, if a visitor consents to Analytics and Customization but not Advertising, only the Advertising-category items stay blocked.
What happens to unclassified cookies
Cookies the autoblocker detects but hasn't yet matched to a provider are placed in Unclassified while we work with the provider to categorize them. Like every other non-essential category, Unclassified stays blocked until a visitor specifically selects it and confirms their preferences — and because visitors have no way to know what an unlabeled cookie actually is, few opt in, so in practice these should be expected to stay blocked for most visitors. If you have a cookie or script that needs to run but is showing as Unclassified, contact support with the domain so we can confirm it and, if appropriate, recategorize it (for example, as Essential) rather than leaving it dependent on visitors opting into an unlabeled category.
Why we can't share the full internal blocking list
The complete list of domains and scripts the autoblocker checks against is proprietary and changes frequently as new tracking technologies appear. A static export would go stale within weeks and could lead to override configurations based on outdated assumptions. Instead, this article covers the logic, and the site-specific scan report (below) covers what's actually on the site, which is the part that matters for a configuration.
Checking what applies to your site
The scan report shows every tracker detected on a domain, how it's categorized, and therefore how the autoblocker will treat it. This is kept current with each new scan, so it's the most reliable reference for overrides.
Configuring overrides
If you're unsure how a specific domain or script is categorized, or you believe something should be treated differently on your site, contact support with the specific domain(s) or script(s) in question. We'll confirm how the autoblocker currently treats each one and advise whether an override is appropriate.