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On April 22, 2025, Google quietly disclosed that it is abandoning its long-promised phase-out of third-party cookies in Chrome and will not introduce a new one-click prompt to disable them.
Instead, the company says users can continue to manage tracking preferences through the existing privacy settings while it “remains committed” to Privacy Sandbox APIs.
The reversal arrives after five years of shifting timelines, regulatory headwinds on both sides of the Atlantic, and growing scepticism from publishers and advertisers who have already poured millions into cookieless workarounds.
What led to the decision: Google’s illegal monopoly verdict
Google’s U-turn comes just days after a U.S. federal judge found the company holds illegal monopolies across several links of the AdTech chain, putting additional pressure on the search giant’s advertising strategy.
Google says it will appeal, but a full victory seems unlikely, as two separate U.S. courts have now labelled the company an illegal monopolist (the first was the search verdict in September 2024).
Why it matters for cookies: Every regulatory or judicial swing at Google’s ad stack shrinks the room the company has to experiment.
Keeping third-party cookies alive in Chrome buys Google time to fight the breakup case without simultaneously rebuilding its core ad infrastructure.
Lena Cohen, staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, pointed out that “Google’s decision to keep third-party cookies—when every major browser blocks them—shows how an ad-driven business model trumps user privacy. We need robust U.S. legislation so ad companies don’t set the rules.”
Meanwhile, industry observers note that sustained regulatory pressure in the US and the CMA’s ongoing investigation in the UK left Chrome’s cookie deprecation plan politically fragile.
Mathieu Roche, CEO of ID5, one of the leading providers of addressable advertising solutions, told Digiday, “I don’t believe in coincidences at Google. It feels like a negotiation tactic with the DOJ to keep Chrome inside the tent”.
The Xenoss take
Same playbook, different chapter.
Google has once again chosen the least disruptive path for its commercial interests—keeping the status quo intact while it fights antitrust battles on multiple fronts.
From a purely economic perspective, the decision is rational: third-party cookies underpin a multi-billion-dollar demand-side marketplace that still flows predominantly through Google pipes.
Turning that tap off while regulators hover with break-up orders would have been an unnecessary source of budget strain and technical pressure to offer viable alternatives.
Yet the climb-down leaves the broader ecosystem holding an expensive bag of “privacy-ready” investment.
How the AdTech ecosystem should react to Google’s decision
CFOs and organizational leaders
Over the past 36 months, agencies, publishers, and MarTech vendors have funnelled R&D budgets into contextual engines, ID graphs, clean rooms, and probabilistic modelling—all predicated on Chrome finally shutting the cookie door.
In 2025, CFOs will likely reconsider first-party data spend and push vendors to prove incremental value on top of the newly resurrected third-party cookies. Types of solutions reliant on third-party data (e.g., traditional DMPs) may experience a revival in the near future.
Advertisers
For advertisers, the immediate implication is getting tactical breathing room.
Targeting, frequency capping, and cross-site attribution pipelines remain intact, so campaign workflows will continue uninterrupted.
Yet, staying complacent is not the most intelligent strategic bet.
Privacy regulations—particularly in the EU—continue to tighten. Safari and Firefox still block third-party cookies by default, and the walled-garden duopoly (Meta and Amazon) never relied on them in the first place.
In such a diverse privacy landscape, future-facing brands should not strive to bring cookies back to the forefront of their data strategies and continue diversifying data strategies with first-party assets and durable IDs.
Publishers
Publishers find themselves in a bittersweet position.
An AdTech and Sales Director at a major European publisher told Digiday, “The whole process has been like watching a car crash in slow motion — trial-and-error, trial-and-regulator-rejection, trial-and-defeat.”
On one hand, cookie continuity stabilises open-web yield in the short term. On the other hand, Google’s shift may slow the buy-side appetite for direct, first-party data partnerships that have been gaining momentum over the last 3-4 years.
To avoid sliding back into dependency, premium publishers will likely double down on authenticated traffic, consent orchestration, and value-exchange UX elements that deliver upside regardless of Chrome’s mood swings.
AdTech vendors
From a tech-stack perspective, the decision may accelerate consolidation.
Businesses built solely on replacing cookies now face an existential funding crunch. In contrast, platforms that embed privacy-adaptive infrastructure, such as edge storage, on-device cohorts, and server-side API pipes, are suddenly differentiated.
At the same time, organization leaders at AdTech companies echo the general sentiment of Google’s cookie backpedaling being tone-deaf to the industry’s privacy-preserving trajectory.
In a VideoWeek interview, Adam Schenkel, EVP Global Platform Strategy at GumGum, commented, “Doubling down on cookies sends the wrong signal. The internet doesn’t have a targeting problem; it has a trust problem.”
Scope3’s agentic model—which optimises at the impression level with or without legacy IDs—looks prescient here, even if its sustainability claims warrant scrutiny.
Bottom line
Google’s volte-face should not be taken for a full-on cookie renaissance.
The structural forces reshaping digital advertising—regulation, platform power shifts, and AI-driven optimisation—still come into play. Industry experts continue to state that, for third-party cookies, “the writing is on the wall,” and Google’s decision is not reflective of broader industry trends.
To stay ahead of privacy-preserving changes, savvy brands and publishers should find a balancing act between continuous modernization to build a diverse data strategy and wisely choosing their investments in alternative IDs and cookieless solutions now that the sense of urgency is no longer present.
