Consent Management Platform (CMP)

A consent management platform (CMP) helps a website or app request, record, and update privacy choices for activities such as analytics, advertising, or optional storage. A CMP may display a consent interface, store a user's selections, and pass consent signals to tags or vendors. The features and legal obligations depend on jurisdiction, processing purpose, and implementation.

Software alone does not make a website compliant. The underlying choices must be meaningful; people need adequate information about relevant processing and, where consent is required, a practical way to refuse or later withdraw it. A banner that appears correctly can still be misleading if tags load before permission or if refusal does not affect the actual data flows. Teams should test the banner, consent records, and connected integrations together.

A CMP is different from a content management system (CMS): a CMS organizes website content, while a CMP manages privacy-related choices. It is also different from Google Consent Mode, which conveys consent states to Google tags rather than acting as a complete consent-management system.