Do I need a cookie banner (and a privacy policy)?
The short answer: you need a cookie banner if — and only if — your site does something optional to visitors. Counting visits is optional. Advertising tags are optional. Keeping someone signed in, or remembering their cookie choice, is not.
So it isn't a question about your size, your country's paperwork, or whether you sell anything. It's a question about what your site actually runs.
On bernard, that decision is automatic
You don't have to work out the answer and act on it. Your site does:
- Nothing optional running → no banner. Nothing appears, nothing is dismissed, nothing is stored in your visitors' browsers beyond what the site needs to work.
- Something optional running → the banner appears by itself and does the asking, and nothing optional starts until the visitor has answered.
Switch bernard's measuring on and the banner arrives. Switch it off and it goes. There's no plugin to install, no consent tool to buy, and no setting for you to get wrong. How the banner behaves once it's there is in How does the cookie banner on my site work?; if you want to know what's on your site in the first place, that's What's tracking my visitors on my site?.
The privacy-policy question, which is a different question
This is where most owners conflate two things, so it's worth separating them properly.
Your cookies page answers one narrow question: what gets stored in a visitor's browser, what it's for, and what they can decline. That page keeps itself accurate — see Can I change the cookies page on my site?.
A privacy policy is broader and it is yours. It covers the things only you know:
- who you are and how someone reaches you about their data;
- what personal information you collect — enquiries, orders, course signups, mailing list (How forms and signups work on my site);
- why you collect it, and what you do with it;
- how long you keep it and who else sees it (your payment provider, your mailing provider);
- what rights people have and how to exercise them.
Bernard can draft that page and put it on your site for your approval, but the facts in it are facts about how you work, so they have to come from you. If your set-up is at all unusual, that's the point to take advice rather than adopt someone else's wording.
The cookies page is not a substitute for it, and a privacy policy is not a substitute for asking about cookies. You want both, and neither takes long.
One more thing people mix up
Asking a visitor about cookies is not the same as having permission to email someone. Different law, different record, different consequence for getting it wrong — email permission is a per-person thing, and it's covered in When do I need someone's permission to email them?.
If you want the foundations rather than the direct answer, start at What are cookies, and why does my site need a banner?. For what bernard does with your data, as opposed to your visitors', see What does bernard do with my data, and is it GDPR-compliant?.
The prompt
“Tell me whether my site needs a cookie banner right now and why, and what a privacy policy would need to cover that my cookies page doesn't.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.
Questions people ask
- Do I need a cookie banner on a simple brochure site?
- Only if something optional is running on it. Pages, pictures and a contact form on their own set nothing that needs asking about, so there's no banner. Switch visit counting on and there is one — automatically, with nothing for you to approve or install.
- Is a cookies page the same as a privacy policy?
- No. The cookies page answers one narrow question — what gets stored in a visitor's browser and what they can decline. A privacy policy is broader: who you are, what personal information you collect (orders, enquiries, signups), why, how long you keep it and who else sees it. You need both, and they do different jobs.
- Does bernard write my privacy policy for me?
- It stays yours. Bernard can draft a page and put it on your site for your approval, but the contents describe how *you* run your business — what you collect, why, and how long you keep it — so it needs your facts and, if anything about your set-up is unusual, your own advice. What Bernard keeps accurate on its own is the cookie list.
- What happens if I ignore all of this?
- On a bernard site, less than you'd fear: if something optional runs, the banner appears and does the asking whether or not you thought about it, so the visitor is never tracked unasked. What's left undone is the privacy policy, and that's the one worth an hour of your time — nobody can approve it into existence for you.