Glossary

Cookie consent banner

The overlay on every first visit — and in every automated capture, unless you take it out.

By Roger Campos · Last updated: September 2026

TL;DR

A cookie consent banner is the notice a website shows to ask a visitor to accept or refuse non-essential cookies and tracking, as the EU's GDPR and ePrivacy rules require. Most are supplied by consent-management vendors and injected by JavaScript as an overlay on top of the page.

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How it works

How banners work

Under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, a site needs consent before setting cookies that aren't strictly necessary. So on a first visit, with no consent cookie stored, a script from a consent-management vendor — OneTrust, Cookiebot, Usercentrics, Didomi and others — draws a banner or a full-screen dialog, and records the answer in a cookie. Many follow the IAB's Transparency and Consent Framework, which passes that answer on to ad partners.

In practice

How it gets into your results

An automated browser is always a first visit. So the banner is in every screenshot, often covering the page, and its text is in the DOM — along with the preference panel's cookie policy, which can be thousands of words. Scrape the page to Markdown and the policy is part of the "content"; send it to a model and you pay for it in tokens. Some sites go further and hold the content back until consent is given — a consent wall.

Clicking "Accept" in a script makes it disappear, but it also gives consent on your behalf, and every vendor's button is different.

URLpipe

Removing it with URLpipe

page_options.block_cookie_banners removes the banners of the vendors that serve most of the web, and the policy text their panels put in the page. Nothing is clicked, so no consent is given. What is removed is gone from every result — the HTML, the Markdown, the summary and the screenshot. On onetrust.com it takes about 16,000 characters of cookie policy out of the page's text.

POST /markdown

{
  "url": "https://example.com/article",
  "sync": true,
  "page_options": { "block_cookie_banners": true, "remove_selectors": [".my-own-consent-bar"] }
}

A home-made banner no vendor list knows about goes with remove_selectors. A consent wall that withholds the content is a different problem: removing the banner does not bring back content the site never sent. See Page options.

Try it

Cookie consent banner, on a page you choose

Screenshot any website from its URL

Paste a link and get a full-page PNG of the rendered page — JavaScript executed, exactly as a real browser would draw it. Great for previews, monitoring and visual QA.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do I remove the cookie banner from a screenshot?

Remove the banner's elements before capturing — by selector, or with an option that knows the common vendors — rather than clicking accept, which gives consent.

Does removing the banner accept the cookies?

Not when it is removed from the page. Clicking a button gives consent; deleting the element doesn't.

Why is cookie policy text in my scraped Markdown?

Consent tools put their full preference panel, policy included, in the page's DOM. A converter that reads the DOM reads it too unless the banner is removed first.

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