A CMP (Consent Management Platform) is the tool that requests, records and enforces visitors’ consent for cookies and other tracking technologies on a website. It is what displays the consent banner and the preference centre.
A CMP does four essential things: it presents cookie categories (necessary, analytics, marketing) clearly; it stops non-essential scripts loading before consent; it keeps a record of each visitor’s choices; and it lets visitors withdraw or change consent at any time.
To meet the GDPR and the rules on privacy in electronic communications, rejecting should be as easy as accepting, options should not be pre-ticked and the information should be easy to understand. A CMP also passes the consent state to other tools, for example through Google Consent Mode v2.
Installing a CMP does not guarantee compliance on its own. You still need to check that tags actually respect the visitor’s choices and that the cookie list is kept up to date.