Cookieless analytics tools count visits without storing an identifier on the visitor's device. Plausible, for example, builds a daily identifier from a hash of a rotating salt, the site, the IP address and the browser, and deletes the salt every 24 hours. You keep page views, traffic sources and daily unique visitors; you lose the ability to recognize a returning visitor across days or devices. Whether you still need a consent banner depends on where your visitors are: France's CNIL, for example, exempts audience measurement only under specific conditions.
A cookieless tool does not store an identifier in the visitor's browser. Plausible's data policy describes its method: each request is turned into a daily identifier by hashing a daily salt, the website's domain, the IP address and the browser's user agent. The salt is "rotated and deleted every 24 hours", and the raw IP address and user agent are not stored. (Plausible data policy)
You keep the numbers most small businesses actually use: page views, which pages people read, where visitors came from, and unique visitors within a day.
You lose anything that depends on recognizing the same person later. Plausible says its method "does not let us recognize the same visitor across days, across devices or on another website", so someone who returns tomorrow counts again, and multi-visit journeys are not tracked.
Whether a consent banner is needed depends on the law where your visitors are, not on the tool's marketing. In France, the CNIL exempts audience measurement from consent when it serves only the site owner, produces only anonymous statistics, is not combined with other data and does not track people across sites. It recommends limiting tracker lifetime to about 13 months and keeping the data for no more than 25 months. (CNIL, July 4, 2025)
Other countries and US states have their own rules. Whether a banner is required for your site is a question for your attorney.
Which analytics tool you use, what it collects, how long it keeps data, and where your privacy policy describes it. The cookieless analytics guide covers the set-up, and the free vendor data checklist helps you review the vendor.
This brief describes published vendor and regulator statements. It is not legal advice.
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