by Evan Rutchik, President & Chief Strategy Officer at Viamedia.ai
Fairly recently, the digital advertising industry was in a state of total chaos. Before AI took over the conversation, everyone was concerned with Google’s plans to end support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, and what that would mean for online ad targeting and measurement.
While Google ultimately did a complete about-face and decided to keep cookies, that doesn’t mean that advertisers should continue to rely solely on cookies for their digital advertising efforts. With or without Google, there are still forces at work limiting just how large of an audience is available via cookies.
For advertisers, there’s never been a better time to decrease their reliance on cookies.
The browser issue
Chrome has long been the dominant browser, with greater than 50% market share. Google’s plans to cut off cookie support would mean that advertisers would essentially lose any visibility into consumers who used Chrome. With such a large market share, the problem would have been catastrophic.
While Chrome earned all of the headlines, it wasn’t alone. Safari, which accounts for around 30% of the market, and Firefox, which accounts for 4%, already do not support third-party cookies on their browsers. That means that right now, even with Chrome still supporting cookies, at minimum one-third of the total addressable market is not accessible to brands via cookies. While some brands may be able to live with that, it leaves a huge swath of potential customers ultimately going unreached via digital. That’s an opportunity for any advertiser.
Contributing factors
Despite all of the attention that went to Chrome in the early 2020s, in 2026, browsers are only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to why cookies are less reliable. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in 2018, has forever altered consumers’ experiences with tracking and permissions. Even though GDPR was built as a European regulation, its impact has been far reaching. In order to comply with EU regulations, nearly every website presents visitors with a pop up window asking if they opt in to tracking. The result is that a majority of consumers opt out, limiting the amount of signal advertisers have access to.
There are domestic laws as well. California’s Opt Me Out Act aims to make it much easier for the state’s 39 million residents to opt out of data sharing.
Then there’s the encroachment of AI, which has completely altered web traffic in several ways. First and foremost, AI-powered answer engines have decimated traffic to the open web. Some publishers have experienced 40% declines in traffic, largely due to a decline in organic search referrals. At the same time, AI and bots are now responsible for more web traffic than actual humans.
We haven’t even touched on the fact that cookies never really were the most accurate tool in the first place. The long held joke in the ad industry is that a digital audience segment of “auto intenders” frequently contains more profiles than there are cars sold in this country each year. Some thought leaders have gone so far as to refer to cookies as “junk data in bulk.”
All of these factors are making the ubiquitous cookie that powered online advertising for decades less reliable than it has ever been, regardless of what one browser does.
Advertisers’ opportunity
Fortunately, advertisers have several options for effective ad targeting and measurement outside of cookies. In the digital media realm, there are two data signals that remain consistent with or without identifiers: location and context.
Contextual data is hardly new, but is still effective for advertisers looking to match their ads with appropriate, brand safe content. This allows them to align their brand messages with the type of content they think will attract their target audience.
Location, meanwhile, has been largely underutilized. Advertisers have always been able to geo-target campaigns by zip code, but new advancements allow advertisers to focus on more tightly defined areas. This is a great evolution, because zip codes themselves are inconsistent. Not every zip code is the same size or population, which means there is no uniformity in reach or behavior for advertisers. By using tighter, smaller geo areas, advertisers can turn location into a proxy for behavior, helping them deliver targeted, privacy-safe ads without the use of identifiers.
Finally, there’s TV. Connected TV and streaming have been getting attention from advertisers for years because they combine the digital delivery and targeting capabilities of the web with the deeply-engaging viewership experience of TV. However, now even linear TV is getting in on the act. New advancements have made linear TV addressable, meaning that advertisers can target viewers on a household level. This makes all forms of TV predictive and performance based.
So while cookies may never go away, advertisers need to be aware that the golden days of identifier-based targeting may be behind us. However, the ad industry is entering a new evolutionary stage, one where it’s possible to build high-performing campaigns that resonate with consumers and reach a target audience, all without the use of the cookie.
