Third-party cookies did not disappear. They stopped being something a store can rely on.

For years they were how ad tech recognised a person across the web. An ad network's cookie sat on thousands of sites, so it could build an interest profile, retarget a shopper who left your store, and credit a sale to the ad they saw days before.

Two things made that weaker every year. Regulation: the EU's GDPR from 2018 and the ePrivacy rules require consent for cookies that are not strictly necessary, and California's CCPA gives shoppers the right to opt out of their data being sold or shared. And browsers: Apple's Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default since March 2020, and Mozilla made Total Cookie Protection the default in Firefox in June 2022. On a phone-heavy store, the Safari share alone is a large part of the traffic.

Older articles, including the version of this page we published before, said Chrome would remove third-party cookies in 2024. It did not. Google ran a test that turned them off for 1% of Chrome users in January 2024, then announced in July 2024 that it would not remove them and would instead let users choose. In April 2025 it said it would not add a new prompt either, and would keep the existing cookie settings.

The replacement technologies went the same way. The Topics API, which was to let a browser tell advertisers a few broad interests instead of sharing a cookie, was one of the Privacy Sandbox APIs Google announced it would retire in October 2025, citing low adoption.

Why the delay does not help much

Third-party cookies still work in Chrome for users who have not blocked them and, in the EU, who said yes to the banner. That is a shrinking and skewed part of your audience. Safari users, Firefox users, people with ad blockers and people who declined consent are already invisible to them. Planning for a store that still depends on them means planning around a gap that is already there.

Record events yourself, on your server

Your own site sees every visit, search, cart and order, whatever the browser does to third-party scripts. Record them first-party, and send purchases to Meta and Google from your server rather than from a pixel. The server-side tracking guide covers how that works and what it fixes.

Join one shopper into one profile

A shopper who browses on a phone and buys on a laptop is one person. Link the visits when they give you a signal, a login, an email click or an order, so you stop treating one customer as several (identity resolution).

Give people a reason to say yes

Consent is easier to get when the shopper sees the benefit: search that understands them, products in their size, a back-in-stock message for the thing they wanted. The relevance that comes from first-party data is what makes a shopper agree to share more of it (personalization guide).

Follow up on channels you own

Email, web push and messaging apps reach people who opted in to hear from you, with no third-party cookie involved. A visitor who allows web push can be reached before you know their email.