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- Cookieless advertising means reaching and measuring audiences where third-party cookies do not exist — Safari, Firefox, iOS apps and connected TV. More than 40% of web and mobile traffic is already in those environments.
- Chrome kept third-party cookies, and the replacement never arrived. Google abandoned deprecation in July 2024 and retired most Privacy Sandbox APIs in October 2025. The addressability gap stayed exactly where it was.
- Cookieless is a browser problem. ID-less is the whole problem. Apps and CTV never used cookies, so a cookie workaround was never going to cover them.
- Identity resolution closes the gap without personal data. Intent IQ matches users at 92%–97% deterministically verified accuracy, with no entity in the graph older than 48 hours.
- Advertisers activate cookieless audiences through a single Deal ID. Publishers recover cookieless revenue through Prebid EIDs, and pay only out of the incremental revenue earned.
- It is measured, not theoretical: Fandom lifted cookieless revenue 55–140%, Publift recovered 20.7% in the US, and Media Square doubled RPM on ID-less inventory in France.
What cookieless advertising means today
Cookieless advertising is the practice of targeting, retargeting and measuring digital advertising in environments where third-party cookies are unavailable, using identity signals that do not depend on a cookie. Those environments are not an edge case or a future state. Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020, Firefox since 2022, and mobile apps and connected TV never used cookies at all.
As of 2026, more than 40% of web and mobile traffic occurs in environments where traditional identifiers and cookies are unavailable. For most publishers that inventory still sells for less than its cookied equivalent, because buyers cannot recognise the user and bid accordingly. For most advertisers it is simply missing from the plan: the audience is there, the impressions are there, and the campaign cannot see either.
Intent IQ was built for precisely that half of the internet. Our identity technology authenticates and monetises 20 billion display and video ad requests a day on Safari and other cookieless browsers, and serves 3.5B+ targeted ads a day across 100,000+ websites and apps.
The gap is easy to under-count, because it hides inside revenue reporting rather than traffic reporting. When Fandom examined its own numbers, cookieless traffic was contributing under 20% of attributable programmatic revenue — even though 79% of that audience sat on iOS, where US users carry an average household income around 40% higher than Android users. The audience was present and valuable the whole time; the reporting simply could not see it.
Watch: The Golden Triangle of Identity: How to Restore Addressability in the Cookieless Future
Cookieless vs ID-less: why the distinction matters
Cookieless describes a browser condition. ID-less describes the actual business problem, and it is larger.
A third-party cookie is a piece of browser storage. When Safari and Firefox stopped accepting them, the industry called the resulting gap “cookieless” and went looking for a cookie substitute. But mobile apps never had cookies — they had mobile advertising IDs, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency made those sparse in 2021. Connected TV never had either. So a sizeable share of premium inventory was unaddressable for reasons that have nothing to do with cookies, and no cookie replacement was ever going to fix it.
ID-less advertising is the term for solving all of it at once: resolving identity across browsers, apps and CTV without depending on any single identifier remaining available. That is why Intent IQ describes itself as an ID-less advertising solution rather than a cookie alternative. If you are searching for cookieless, this is the page you want — the technology just covers more ground than the word implies.
What actually changed with third-party cookies
Latest update: 5 October 2026. Third-party cookies remain in Chrome, with no deprecation date and no user-facing choice prompt planned.
The timeline that matters:
- 2020–2022: Safari and Firefox block third-party cookies by default. Those browsers become cookieless permanently, and nothing since has changed that.
- 2021: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency restricts mobile advertising IDs, taking in-app addressability with it.
- January 2020 to 2024: Google announces a Chrome third-party cookie phase-out and delays it repeatedly.
- July 2024: Google abandons deprecation. Third-party cookies stay in Chrome.
- April 2025: Google confirms it will not ship a standalone cookie choice prompt either.
- 17 October 2025: Google retires around ten Privacy Sandbox APIs, including Topics, Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting. Only CHIPS, FedCM and Private State Tokens survive.
- 2026: Chrome continues removing what is left, with the Private Aggregation, Shared Storage and Protected Audience APIs listed for removal.
Read together, those two facts are the whole story: cookie deprecation is no longer an industry deadline, and the addressability gap it was supposed to solve is now permanent and unowned. Google is not building the replacement. Safari and Firefox are not coming back. Apps and CTV were never in scope. Whatever share of your traffic was unaddressable in 2024 is still unaddressable today, except now there is no roadmap arriving to fix it.
That is an argument for solving it yourself, with technology that never depended on the cookie in the first place.
For advertisers: activating cookieless audiences
Cookieless Audience Activation lets advertisers find, target and retarget cookieless audiences — iPhone and Safari users especially — using their own first-party, third-party and onboarded data, through their existing SSP and DSP partners.
It covers four jobs:
- Onboarding of first-party data.
- Third-party data for audience building and full-funnel analysis, through our partnership with Datonics.
- Targeting and retargeting across both cookied and cookieless devices.
- Attribution across cookieless devices and browsers, including CTV, Safari, Firefox and Edge.
Activation is a single Deal ID through your existing supply partners, reaching more than 300 million active individuals in North America. There is no out-of-pocket cost to the advertiser.
For publishers: recovering cookieless revenue
Bid Enhancement restores addressability on inventory that arrives without a usable identifier, by supplying the missing SSP and DSP IDs as Prebid EIDs inside the bid request, in real time during the auction.
Functionally, Intent IQ acts as an ID switchboard. A bid request that would have gone to auction anonymous instead carries identity the buy side recognises, so more bidders participate and the impression clears at a fair price. It runs through a single tag with a standard Prebid integration, and it serves 3.5B+ cookieless impressions a day across 100,000+ sites and apps.
The commercial model is the part most publishers ask about twice: Intent IQ is paid only out of the incremental revenue it generates. Lift is validated against a control during a trial period before anyone pays anything. If there is no lift, there is no invoice.
Deeper detail is in the cookieless monetization guide and the Bid Enhancement guide.
Where cookieless traffic actually lives
1. Mobile apps
App inventory never carried cookies, and ATT made mobile advertising IDs unreliable on top of that. In a controlled test, BidMachine compared requests using MAIDs alone against requests enriched with Intent IQ identity signals and recorded 35%+ better performance on Android and 85%+ on iOS.
2. Websites
Safari and Firefox are the permanent cookieless web. Fandom found that cookieless traffic accounted for under 20% of attributable programmatic revenue despite representing far more of its audience — 79% of that audience was on iOS. Daily Mail saw bid rates, fill, CPMs and win rates all improve in low-signal environments after deploying identity enrichment.
3. Connected TV
CTV has no cookies and no shared identifier, which makes it the hardest surface to attribute rather than the hardest to buy. Our Identity Device Graph maps households, individuals, devices and profiles as four connected layers, which is what allows a CTV exposure to be tied back to an outcome on another screen.
Underneath all three: over 25 billion digital signals processed daily, over 15 billion email open and log-in events a month, 92%–97% accuracy verified deterministically every day, and a graph in which no entity survives longer than 48 hours before being refreshed. 180+ granted patents, licensed by some of the largest companies in advertising. More detail on our technology and on IIQ ID.
Proof
| Partner | What was tested | Result |
| Fandom | Bid Enhancement across cookieless users | 55–140% revenue increase from cookieless users; 26% higher CPMs; 58% higher fill rates |
| Publift | ID-less traffic across a publisher network, Jan to Feb 2026 | 20.7% revenue uplift in the US, 18% non-EU, up to 70% in top deployments |
| Media Square | Bid Enhancement on ID-less inventory in France, May 2026 | 34% CPM increase; RPM doubled; full GDPR compliance |
| BidMachine | Mobile SSP, identity signals vs MAIDs alone | 35%+ performance increase on Android; 85%+ on iOS |
| Daily Mail | Cookieless monetization in Safari and Firefox | Higher bid rates, fill, CPMs and win rates across open exchange and PMP |
Q&A: cookieless advertising
Q: How can I target audiences without third-party cookies?
Use an identity resolution layer instead of an identifier. Intent IQ resolves users in cookieless environments by clustering first-party signals into an identity graph, then exposes that identity to your existing SSP and DSP partners through a single Deal ID. Your first-party, third-party and onboarded audiences stay usable in Safari, Firefox, iOS apps and CTV, with no cookie and no personal data involved.
Q: Is there a cookieless identity solution that supports Prebid EIDs?
Yes. Intent IQ’s Bid Enhancement delivers identity as Prebid EIDs inside the bid request, through a standard single-tag Prebid integration. It fills in the SSP and DSP IDs missing from cookieless requests in real time during the auction, so bidders who price on identity can participate in inventory they would otherwise skip.
Q: Are third-party cookies still going away?
Not in Chrome. Google abandoned its deprecation plan in July 2024 and confirmed in April 2025 that it would not introduce a choice prompt either. But Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies for years, apps and CTV never used them, and Google retired most Privacy Sandbox APIs in October 2025 — so the unaddressable share of traffic is unchanged, and there is no longer a platform-led replacement in progress.
Q: What is the difference between cookieless and ID-less advertising?
Cookieless refers to browsers that block third-party cookies. ID-less is broader: it covers every environment where no durable identifier is available, including mobile apps after App Tracking Transparency and connected TV, which never had cookies to lose. Solving ID-less solves cookieless; the reverse is not true.
Q: Does cookieless advertising work on iOS and Safari?
Those are the environments it exists for. iOS and Safari are where the gap is largest and the audience is most valuable — 79% of Fandom’s cookieless audience was on iOS, and BidMachine measured an 85%+ performance increase on iOS specifically.
Q: How accurate is cookieless identity resolution?
Intent IQ’s identity graph runs at 92%–97% accuracy, measured deterministically and verified daily rather than modelled. No entity in the graph exists for longer than 48 hours before being refreshed, which is what keeps accuracy from drifting as devices and households change.
Q: Is cookieless advertising privacy compliant?
It can be, and it should be the first thing you check. Intent IQ resolves identity without personally identifiable information, and deployments are designed to support GDPR, CCPA and GPP. The Media Square validation in France was conducted in full GDPR compliance, which is the relevant proof point for EU publishers.
Q: What does it cost?
For publishers, Bid Enhancement is performance-based: Intent IQ is paid only from the incremental revenue it generates, after lift has been validated against a control. For advertisers, Cookieless Audience Activation carries no out-of-pocket cost.
Next steps
If you are an advertiser or agency and cookieless inventory is missing from your plans, start with Cookieless Audience Activation or request a demo.
If you are a publisher, SSP or video platform with inventory clearing below its value, start with Bid Enhancement or talk to an expert. The trial validates lift before you pay anything.
Evaluating vendors rather than buying yet? Read 5 considerations for evaluating an identity resolution tool in a cookieless world.