Using AI to review cookie categories without losing control

The scanner comes first, and it is picky

AI cannot classify its way out of bad input, so in UserGuard the scanner sets the table. It crawls your site in two passes across up to 50 pages by default and records a cookie only when there is hard evidence for it: a Set-Cookie header, an HTTP-only record, or a value in document.cookie. Other tracking technology it finds is kept separately as labeled context, not as padding in your cookie list.

That evidence gate matters for everything downstream. When the AI drafts a classification, it is describing something verified on your actual site, not guessing from a directory of cookies other sites happen to use.

What the AI drafts, and how sure it is

For each verified cookie, AI review drafts a category, a provider, and a purpose in plain language, each with a confidence percentage. Cookie names are cryptic by accident or on purpose, and few site owners can say offhand what _fbp, _ga, or intercom-device-id does. The draft turns the evidence into something you can read and check.

The confidence number is the honest part. A 96 percent suggestion about a well-known analytics cookie deserves different scrutiny than a 61 percent guess about something first-party and obscure. Low confidence is the product telling you where your attention belongs.

Nothing publishes without your approval

Every AI suggestion in UserGuard waits for a human decision. No draft reaches your banner, your preference center, or your cookie policy until you approve it. That is not a limitation we plan to automate away; it is the design.

The reason is that categories are load-bearing. They drive what gets blocked before consent, through Consent Mode v2 defaults and script blocking rules. A marketing cookie mislabeled as necessary quietly fires before anyone agrees, and tags firing before the choice is exactly what enforcement actions on both sides of the Atlantic keep turning on. A wrong label is not a cosmetic bug.

Approved records feed the documents

Once you approve the inventory, UserGuard generates a cookie policy draft from it: what each category does, why the site uses it, and how visitors manage their preferences. Drafts are versioned and, like everything else here, written for a person to review and edit before publishing.

Because the policy comes from your approved records rather than a template, it stays connected to what your site actually sets. When a rescan changes the inventory, the document has something real to update from, which is more than most generic cookie policies can say.

The one metered feature, on purpose

AI review is the only metered feature in UserGuard: 10 runs per site per month, which comfortably covers a rescan cadence without inviting you to outsource judgment to a rerun button. Nothing with direct compliance weight, Global Privacy Control handling included, sits behind a meter or an upgrade.

If you want to test the workflow on your own site, the sequence is short: run a scan, read the drafts next to their confidence scores, and see whether you could explain every cookie to a visitor in one sentence. Wherever you cannot, you have found this month's review work.

Go deeper: how AI review fits the workflow