Third-party cookies are finally being phased out by Google’s Chrome web browser.

Google has been warning (or promising, depending on your point of view) this day was coming for several years now, yet advertisers still aren’t ready for it, nor are many website owners and webmasters. The effects of “Cookie D-Day” will vary depending on the site, ranging from there being no discernible effects to complete site breakage, depending on how third-party cookies are used.

For that reason, Google recommends webmasters audit their sites today for their use of these offending little bits of code.

In the below video a Google engineer explains how webmasters can audit their website for third-party cookies. It’s a fairly complicated process, so be forewarned, it’s not for newbies.

Said audit involves the use of Chrome Developer Tools, which can be used to diagnose an array of issues on a website. From the Chrome menu bar select View | Developer | Developer Tools to access the functionality. The Dev Tools interface is complex, but within that UI you will search for cookies with the SameSite=None attribute. This is described more fully in the above video.

Dev Tools is not a tool that non-programmers will be comfortable using, which is odd. One would expect the company behind the push to phase out third-party cookies to create a more accessible tool for that purpose.

One gets the sense that Google is a bit conflicted about the push to remove third-party cookies, like the company has been forced into a corner. That would make sense. Third-party cookies are a huge source of revenues for the company.

It’s ironic but not surprising that an audit of cookies on this website showed 90% of them are Google’s. It’s the snake eating its own tail, to be sure, but why isn’t Google in compliance with its own initiative?

Pleasing both shareholders and customers is a balancing act, but if companies don’t get in front of the push towards privacy consumers are demanding, and regulate themselves, governments will do it for them with additional laws like the GDPR.

Since Google’s dropping the ball a bit, users who want an easier approach to auditing their site for third-party cookies have some commercial offerings that are easier to use. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that will perform such an audit (instructions are here), but it is expensive. The first 500 crawled URLs are free, but a typical blog will burn through these relatively quickly, since URLs include not just web pages but also CSS documents, images, taxonomies and so on.

Another option for third-party cookie enumeration is Usercentrics Cookiebot, though my testing produced mixed results. Also, you won’t get a list of all relevant cookies without a paid subscription. New users may, however, sign up for a free trial.

The best option to enumerate third-party cookies for WordPress users may be a plugin. Complianz is an excellent plugin that will provide a complete cookie audit, and is free.

It should be noted that the Firefox web browser removed third-party cookies back in 2019 (with Safari later following suit), and the world didn’t end, and websites continued to work. The third-party cookie hype feels a lot like Y2K did back in the day, actually, although I’m dating myself to admit it.

Despite being late to the party phasing out third-party cookies, Google’s action is viewed as significant, since Chrome controls 65% of the browser market.