Importing consent from your previous CMP

Switching consent platforms should not mean re-prompting every visitor who already made a choice. When consent import is enabled for your site, ConsentStack reads the consent record your previous CMP stored in the visitor's browser and honors it: visitors who accepted stay accepted, visitors who declined stay declined, and nobody sees a second banner for a decision they already made.

How it works

1. On the first page load after your cutover, the SDK looks for your previous CMP's first-party consent cookie (for Cookiebot, the CookieConsent cookie).
2. If it finds a valid, explicit decision that has not expired, it maps the categories to your ConsentStack categories and applies them immediately, before any tracking scripts can run. The banner is not shown.
3. The decision is converted into a native ConsentStack record and logged to your consent log with the original evidence attached (the previous CMP's consent ID, timestamp, and region), so your audit trail stays continuous even after you cancel the old vendor.
4. From the second page load on, the native ConsentStack record is used. The old cookie is left in place and simply expires on its own.

What gets imported

Only explicit decisions are imported. Records marked as implied consent, malformed records, and records older than your consent lifetime setting are ignored; those visitors see your banner as normal.

Declines are imported faithfully. A visitor who rejected tracking under your previous CMP stays rejected under ConsentStack, with no re-prompt.

Supported vendors

Consent import works through one connector per previous platform. Each connector reads that platform's own consent cookie and maps it onto your ConsentStack categories.

• Cookiebot. Built, and running in production today.
• Any other platform. We build the connector for you, before your cutover. Tell us what you are migrating from and it will be ready for your go-live.

There is no roadmap queue to join, and nothing here for your developers to build. A connector is a reader for a cookie format we can go and inspect, which is why we write them on request rather than shipping a fixed list. The one requirement is technical: your previous platform has to store its decision somewhere readable in the visitor's own browser. Nearly every platform does. If yours does not, we will tell you before you switch rather than after.

Your historical consent log

Consent import covers the decision your visitors are carrying right now. Your historical consent log is a separate thing, and we move that for you too, during onboarding. Pull the export from your old provider before you cancel, because we cannot sign into their dashboard for you and most providers cut access at the end of the billing period. We will tell you exactly what to export and take it from there, so your evidence from before the switch ends up in the same place as everything after it.

We are not the only platform that carries consent over, and it is worth knowing what the alternatives commit to before you switch. See do you lose your visitors' consent when you switch CMPs? for what each major CMP does, read from its own documentation.

Enabling consent import

Consent import is enabled per site by our team during onboarding. Contact support with the name of your previous CMP and we will switch it on before your cutover.