The question we get
Which consent platform is best? It's one of the most common questions we hear, and it usually arrives right after somebody finds their banner leaking. The banner is the visible part, so it gets the blame, and the next step is a shopping list.
We have data that looks like it could answer the question. The Website Privacy Index scans each site, records which consent platform it detects, and checks what fires before a visitor answers and after a refusal. Splitting that by vendor is a few lines of code. We ran it. We're not publishing it.
What the index measured
Of 47,420 sites scored between January and October 2026, 1,473 had a consent platform detected. Of those, 598 (40.6%) were still observed tracking. The index records two ways that happens:
- Tracking fired before any interaction with the banner.
- Tracking kept firing after a refusal.
Both are measurable from the outside, on a first visit, with no login. That's what makes the index useful. It's also what makes a vendor ranking tempting.
Why we did not rank vendors
The per-vendor numbers differ sharply. That's exactly why we held them back. The report's own section, What we deliberately did not publish, gives two reasons.
Group size. The largest vendor group in the crawl has 584 sites in it, and the smallest has a handful. A rate built on a handful of sites isn't a property of a product that runs on millions of them.
Configuration. In the report's words:
"Leak rates also track configuration far more than they track the tool."
Two sites on the same platform can sit at opposite ends of the index. The difference is almost never the vendor's code. It's which tags were wired to the consent signal, and which weren't.
The perfect scores we left out
We excluded something else too: 50 sites that scored a perfect 100 because the scanner found nothing to fail them on. A leaderboard would have put them at the top. The report explains why it didn't:
"An empty result is not a clean site."
The same caution applies to vendor rankings. A number that looks precise but rests on thin or empty evidence does more damage than no number, because people act on it.
If your banner leaks
When we look at a leaking site, the cause is usually somewhere between the banner and the tags. These are illustrative patterns from audit work, not something the index measures:
- Tags that were never put under the tag manager's consent rules.
- Scripts loaded straight from a page template, outside the tag manager. More on those in The Trackers That Never Pass Through Your Tag Manager.
- A refusal that gets recorded but never acted on, because nothing downstream reads it.
None of those is fixed by switching vendors. Each one would follow the site to the new platform. Buying a Consent Platform Is the First Step, Not the Last covers the same gap from the adoption side.
The free test before any vendor change
- Open a private browser window with developer tools on the Network tab.
- Load your site and click reject.
- Browse two pages.
- Look at what still goes out to analytics and advertising domains.
If requests keep going out after the refusal, you've found a configuration problem. It costs nothing to find, and a new contract won't fix it.
Test the platform you own first
If you still want the market view, our CMP market share page shows which platforms the index detects and how often. It's a count of where each product runs, not a score of how well it works.
Before you buy another platform, test the one you already have. The free privacy scan runs the same checks as the index on your own domain in about a minute.
Source: Rawsoft Website Privacy Index, 47,506 sites scanned and 47,420 scored, January to October 2026. The crawl covers restaurant, hospitality and independent ecommerce sites, so it is not a sample of the whole web.
More from the Website Privacy Index: Cookie banner adoption · Restaurant privacy index · Ecommerce privacy index
Rawsoft provides technical implementation and analysis, not legal advice. Please confirm any regulatory interpretation with your counsel.