What does britishcouncil.org track?
Before any consent, britishcouncil.org loaded 4 tracking companies and set 3 advertising or analytics cookies.
That's more tracking companies than 70% of the 2,450 sites we scanned.
Scanned October 2, 2026 from Germany, loading www.britishcouncil.org once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 4
- Tracking cookies
- 3
- Third-party hosts
- 10
- Cookies in total
- 16
Consent banner
The page loaded OneTrust, a consent management platform. Everything below was recorded before anyone answered it. 4 tracking companies still loaded while it was unanswered.
Companies contacted before consent
2 of the 6 companies it contacted before consent were analytics companies.
- Google Ads8 requestsAdvertising
pagead2.googlesyndication.com
- YouTube2 requestsSocial media
www.youtube.com
- Google Analytics15 requestsAnalytics
www.googletagmanager.com, region1.google-analytics.com
- Pingdom2 requestsAnalytics
rum-static.pingdom.net, rum-collector-2.pingdom.net
Other third parties (content delivery, consent, functional, unclassified)
Cookies set before consent
The longest-lived tracking cookie it set was __Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN, from YouTube, lasting about 6 months.
| Cookie | Purpose | Set by | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| __Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN | Advertising | youtube.com (third party) | 6 months |
| VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | Advertising | youtube.com (third party) | 6 months |
| VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA | Advertising | youtube.com (third party) | 6 months |
| akamai-geo | Unclassified | www.britishcouncil.org | Session |
| trp | Unclassified | www.britishcouncil.org | Session |
| __Secure-YNID | Functional | youtube.com (third party) | 6 months |
| _abck | Functional | britishcouncil.org | 12 months |
| ak_bmsc | Functional | britishcouncil.org | Under a day |
| AKA_A2 | Functional | britishcouncil.org | Under a day |
| OptanonConsent | Functional | britishcouncil.org | 12 months |
| RT | Functional | britishcouncil.org | 7 days |
| YSC | Functional | youtube.com (third party) | Session |
| bm_lso | Necessary | www.britishcouncil.org | 30 days |
| bm_s | Necessary | britishcouncil.org | 31 days |
| bm_so | Necessary | britishcouncil.org | 1 day |
| bm_sz | Necessary | britishcouncil.org | Under a day |
The page also wrote 2 keys to local storage, which works like a cookie but isn't sent with requests.
Understanding this page
- How to see which cookies and trackers a website loads
A hands-on walkthrough for checking what a site sets before you've clicked anything, using Chrome and Firefox's built-in tools, plus how CookieTosser automates the same check every month.
- What counts as valid cookie consent in the EU
The rules that actually govern cookie banners — the ePrivacy Directive, the GDPR consent standard, the Planet49 ruling, the strictly-necessary exemption, and what "reject" has to offer compared with "accept.
- Consent management platforms explained
What a CMP banner is actually doing behind the scenes, how the IAB's TCF standard and Google's Consent Mode v2 fit in, and why a banner being present is no guarantee that nothing loads before you answer it.