What is the bm_sv cookie?
Used by Akamai Botman Manager to help differentiate between web requests generated by humans and web requests generated by bots or other automated processes.
Our October 2026 scan found it on 55 sites (2% of the 2,450 we scanned), set before any consent.
- Purpose
- Functional
- Belongs to
- Akamai
- Set as
- First-party (under the site's own domain)
- Typical lifetime
- Under a day (vendor says: 1 hour or longer)
Sites that set bm_sv before consent
The highest-ranked 30 of 55 sites.
- adobe.com0 tracking companies
- webex.com4 tracking companies
- oracle.com2 tracking companies
- mobile.de0 tracking companies
- ea.com1 tracking company
- washingtonpost.com12 tracking companies
- nike.com1 tracking company
- sophos.com3 tracking companies
- dailymail.com0 tracking companies
- fidelity.com15 tracking companies
Show 20 more sites
- amd.com1 tracking company
- businesswire.com6 tracking companies
- oddspark.com7 tracking companies
- usnews.com4 tracking companies
- xfinity.com8 tracking companies
- redbus.in3 tracking companies
- hpe.com10 tracking companies
- ihg.com3 tracking companies
- mastercard.com1 tracking company
- trellix.com3 tracking companies
- ford.com17 tracking companies
- imf.org4 tracking companies
- faa.gov2 tracking companies
- minecraft.net3 tracking companies
- fcc.gov1 tracking company
- mathworks.com3 tracking companies
- panasonic.com0 tracking companies
- nasdaq.com2 tracking companies
- gm.com10 tracking companies
- today.com19 tracking companies
Related cookies
Other cookies from Akamai.
How to stop it
Declining non-essential cookies in a site's consent banner should stop bm_sv being set on later visits. Blocking third-party cookies in your browser settings stops the third-party kind everywhere, and clearing cookies for a site removes any it already set.
Description from the Open Cookie Database (Apache 2.0).
Understanding this page
- How cookie lifetimes work, and why a 13-month _ga matters
What a cookie's "expires" field actually controls, why Google Analytics ships a 2-year default that many sites cut down to 13 months, and how Safari's 7-day cap on script-set cookies changes the picture.
- First-party vs third-party cookies (and why "first-party" still tracks you)
What the distinction actually means technically, why browsers only block one of the two, and how CNAME cloaking, server-side tagging and cookies like _ga let sites keep tracking under their own domain.
- How to block or limit trackers
Browser privacy settings, content blockers, Global Privacy Control and clearing cookies compared honestly — what each one actually stops, what it doesn't, and what it costs you in return.