The Open Cookie Database is an effort to describe and categorise all major cookies. All cookie descriptions are saved in a downloadable CSV file, Google Spreadsheet or browseable and searchable in an html file. All contributions to the CSV file are welcomed.

All contributions are gratefully received. To contribute to the Open Cookie Database, please follow the following contribution guide.

The definitions of the categories are as follows:

• Functional (also known as technical, essential or strictly necessary)
• Personalization (also known as preferences)
• Analytics (also known as performance or statistics)
• Marketing (also known as tracking or social media)
• Security

The last column in the database is called "Wildcard match". A 0 in this column means that the cookie name is not a wildcard, and a 1 means that the cookie name is a wildcard.

Where a cookie name is not a wildcard, it means that the cookie name is a fixed string. For example, the cookie name _ga will always be _ga when set by Google Analytics.

However, if a cookie name is a wildcard, it means the exact cookie name may change from one website to another. Thankfully, the cookie name will always match a certain pattern. For example, the cookie _gac_1234 is a wildcard cookie name, because the 1234 part of the cookie name can be any string.