The visible on-page interface — typically a banner or pop-up — presented to website visitors, informing them about cookie use and allowing them to accept, decline, or customize their consent preferences.
Why it matters
A cookie consent banner is the visitor-facing component of a broader consent management system, and its design carries real compliance risk — a banner that makes "accept all" prominent while hiding or burying a genuine "reject" option can itself be flagged as a dark pattern under some privacy regulations.
In a sentence
"Legal flagged our cookie consent banner for making 'accept all' a big, obvious button while 'manage preferences' was a small, low-contrast link — exactly the kind of design regulators have started scrutinizing."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Consent management (Part One, Category 8) — the banner is the visible interface a visitor directly interacts with; consent management is the broader underlying system, including the banner, that actually records and enforces those stated preferences).