What does youtube.com track?
Before any consent, youtube.com loaded 0 tracking companies and set 1 advertising or analytics cookie.
Scanned October 2, 2026 from Germany, loading www.youtube.com once and clicking nothing. How we scan
- Tracking companies
- 0
- Tracking cookies
- 1
- Third-party hosts
- 0
- Cookies in total
- 6
Consent banner
No known consent management platform was detected on the page.
Companies contacted before consent
None. Every request stayed on youtube.com.
Cookies set before consent
The longest-lived tracking cookie it set was VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA, from YouTube, lasting about 13 months.
| Cookie | Purpose | Set by | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA | Advertising | youtube.com | 13 months |
| __Secure-BUCKET | Unclassified | youtube.com | 6 months |
| __Secure-YEC | Unclassified | youtube.com | 13 months |
| __Secure-YENID | Unclassified | youtube.com | 13 months |
| PREF | Functional | youtube.com | 13 months |
| YSC | Functional | youtube.com | Session |
The page also wrote 5 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.