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Google has always said that all of their bots do not use cookies.

I caught a screenshot on Google PageSpeed Insights that displayed a modal that I only have implemented for users with a specific cookie already set.

So there you have it, Googlebot uses cookies.

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Dani AI

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Good catch, — this is a common confusion. Short version: a PageSpeed Insights (PSI) screenshot showing a modal is not proof that the core Google crawler stores or re-uses cookies. Google’s rendering infrastructure intentionally clears HTTP cookies and storage between loads (so Google’s renderer/Googlebot won’t persist a cookie across visits), and PSI’s lab data is produced by Lighthouse (a headless Chrome run) which runs in a separate test environment. See Google’s guidance on how rendering and testing behave. (developers.google.com)

How to diagnose what actually happened on your site (quick checklist you can run now):

  • Check server logs for the PSI/Lighthouse request (look for the test time and the request headers).
  • Inspect the response headers to see if a Set-Cookie was sent during the PSI run. For a quick header check use something like:
curl -I -s -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://example.com
  • Reproduce locally with Lighthouse (or Lighthouse CLI) in two modes: with default “clear storage” and with storage retained. DevTools’ Lighthouse can be affected by local cookies; PSI runs remotely with a clean environment. Compare results to see if the cookie state changes the modal. (developer.chrome.com)

Practical SEO takeaways (if the modal blocks indexing or hides content): avoid requiring cookies for critical content, make consent modals non-blocking or server-side render indexable content, and use Search Console’s URL Inspection / Live Test to verify what Google actually sees. Also note that for A/B tests or gating, Google’s docs explicitly warn that Googlebot generally doesn’t support cookies, so don’t rely on cookie-only flows for content you want indexed. (developers.google.com)

Thanks to for the earlier pointer — the behaviour has been discussed for years, but the authoritative docs above are the best place to confirm how Google’s systems handle cookies today.

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Wow, am I far behind the game. Javascript I of course knew. Cookies I didn't!! Thanks for that, Frank.

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