Debugging consent and conversion tracking with a headless scan

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External ID

46671323

Source

HN

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—

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Debugging consent and conversion tracking with a headless scan

Website domain

consentcheck.online

Launched

Jan. 18, 2026

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Upvotes

6

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0.2549407114624506

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Hi HN,I’ve spent the last few months debugging a pattern I kept seeing on client sites:Ads are running, tags are installed, dashboards look fine — but Google Ads conversions are missing, inconsistent, or silently degraded.In most cases, the problem wasn’t the conversion tag itself. It was consent timing:tracking scripts firing before consentcookies set before consentConsent Mode v2 present but misconfiguredconversion events firing before consent updatesThese setups often “look” correct in GTM or DevTools, but behave differently for a real first-time visitor.So I built a small scanner that loads a site like a new user would and checks:what scripts fire before consentwhether cookies are set pre-consentwhether Consent Mode v2 is actually configuredwhether conversions would fire after consentThe output is a technical report with detected issues and suggested fixes (mostly small configuration changes).This is not a compliance/legal tool — it’s meant as a debugging aid for people working with Google Ads, GA4, and consent setups.I’m sharing it here mainly for feedback from people who’ve dealt with consent/tracking edge cases, false positives, or odd GTM behavior.Happy to answer technical questions or explain how detection works.

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