The State of the Cookieless Future in 2022

Ask ten marketers in 2022 when third-party cookies were going away and you’d get ten different answers, and most of them would be wrong. That confusion was the real story of the year, not the cookie itself.

A deadline that kept moving

Google first said in early 2020 that it intended to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. That would have put the cutoff sometime in 2022. It didn’t happen. In June 2021, Google pushed the date to “the second half of 2023,” citing pressure from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which was reviewing whether Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals gave the company an unfair advantage over rival ad tech.

By the middle of 2022, Chrome was still setting third-party cookies by default for the vast majority of users. Safari and Firefox had already blocked them outright, Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention since 2020 and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection since 2019, so a meaningful share of traffic was already effectively cookieless. Chrome, which still commanded roughly two-thirds of global browser share, was the holdout that mattered most to advertisers.

Why the delay kept happening

Google’s replacement framework, the Privacy Sandbox, was still in early testing. The Topics API and FLEDGE (the auction mechanism that later became the Protected Audience API) were running origin trials with a limited slice of Chrome traffic, and early feedback from ad tech companies was mixed on whether the tools could match cookie-based targeting and measurement. Regulators wanted proof the new system wouldn’t just entrench Google’s own ad business before they’d sign off on a full rollout. Every added layer of scrutiny meant another few months of testing.

What businesses were doing about it

Smart marketing teams in 2022 stopped waiting for a firm date and started treating the transition as already underway, because in practice it was:

• Building email and SMS lists instead of leaning on retargeting pixels.
• Shifting analytics setups toward first-party, server-side data collection.
• Testing contextual advertising as a hedge against audience-based targeting.
• Piloting alternative IDs like The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0, which don’t depend on third-party cookies.
• Auditing how much of their attribution model quietly relied on cross-site cookie matching.

The businesses that got caught flat-footed weren’t the ones betting wrong on a date. They were the ones that had built their entire measurement and retargeting stack on an assumption that never had a fixed expiration in the first place.

The honest uncertainty

Nobody outside Google knew in 2022 when Chrome cookies would go away, or in what form. Would it be a hard cutoff, a gradual restriction or something closer to Apple’s opt-in prompt model? That ambiguity was frustrating for anyone trying to plan a media budget a year out, but it also pointed to the one strategy that worked regardless of the exact date: own your first-party relationship with customers so the browser’s cookie policy stops being your business’s problem.

What to watch heading into 2023

Three things were worth tracking as the year closed out: how the Privacy Sandbox origin trials performed against cookie-based benchmarks, whether the CMA gave Google the regulatory green light it needed and how quickly competing ID solutions gained adoption among publishers and ad platforms. None of those questions had firm answers yet, and that was exactly the point: 2022 was a year to prepare for a change whose timing nobody controlled.

The safest assumption remained the simplest one. Third-party cookies were on a one-way path out of the browser, however long the path turned out to be, and the businesses building direct, permissioned relationships with their customers were the ones who wouldn’t care much when the final date arrived.

---

Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Analytics guides, see everything we published in 2022 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.