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How does Cookie Information work?
All you need to know about the scanner
All you need to know about the scanner

Introduction to Cookie Scanning. How does the Scanner work and known limitations.

Piotr avatar
Written by Piotr
Updated over a week ago

What is cookie scanning?

When we, in Cookie Information, refer to cookie scanning, we mean the automatic process that occurs once a month, every week, or every day depending on the scanning frequency chosen. A scan result is a list of cookies found on the domain.

  • Scanning depth refers to how many URL pages of a website Cookie Information scans.

  • Scanning frequency refers to how often Cookie Information scans the domain.

How does the scanner work?

The scanner is a web crawler designed to go through your website and check for cookies page by page. The scan initiates when the domain is added to the Cookie Information Platform and can take up to 24-48 hours to finish.

The scan always starts at the root domain and then acts as a usual user, clicking through links/URL pages. The web crawler moves through the number of URL pages chosen in the scanning depth.

Known limitations

The Cookie Information scanner IP is blocked.

A firewall can block the scanner - which means that it is not able to start scanning. On occasion, the scanner may send a high number of requests. In some instances, a firewall could see this as a DDOS attack.

To ensure that our scanner can crawl your domain correctly, please make sure that your site's firewall is not blocking our scanners' IP address associated with go.cookieinformation.com. Our scanner's IP address is 20.224.113.102.

This issue can be solved by whitelisting our scanner using a User-Agent header that identifies our scanner, allowing it through.

The header is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36 CookieInformationScanner

It's also possible to whitelist the scanner instead of using the same User-Agent header:

CookieInformationScanner

The website contains redirects.

Our scanner will only scan the domain you have added to our platform. Suppose you happen to have added a domain that redirects to another domain. In that case, our scanner cannot continue to the redirect.

Suppose you have created your consent solution and added your domain to the cookie Information platform within the last 24 hours. In that case, it's somewhat likely that your domain has not yet finished scanning. Scans can take up to 24 hours before results are visible on the consent pop-up itself.

You are using another consent pop-up.

Suppose you use another consent pop-up or change the CSS selector's name for the accept cookies button. In that case, our scanner will not recognize it.

If you have changed the CSS selector for the accept button or are using another consent pop-up, please contact us at support@cookieinformation.com.

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