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For a decade, online advertising consent rules only ever tightened and addressable inventory only ever shrank. What started in Europe has gone global, leaving a trail of confusion and dubious legal standing. However in May the ICO quietly proposed the first reversal in what has been an endless tightening cycle. For B2B, whose buyers are anonymous, out-of-market and company-level by nature, it may be the most consequential regulatory shift since GDPR. Here is the mechanics, the signals, and what it tells us about where privacy is actually heading.
Here is a fact most marketers get backwards. When a visitor clicks “Reject all” on a cookie banner today, the ads do not stop. The publisher can still fill the slot. What stops is the signal. The programmatic machinery that decides what the impression is worth goes dark, the bid request arrives stripped of almost everything that gives it value, and a piece of premium inventory that should clear at a healthy price gets sold for pennies or goes unsold entirely.
Everybody loses in this scenario;
Publishers and media creators go unpaid - with independent content getting defunded and let down by the operating model of the internet being rug pulled. This leads to publishers setting more ad placements, which are more detrimental to the user experience, which in turn puts more people off going to their site/s and creates a vortex like vicious circle of decline
Advertisers miss the chance to buy high value account based impressions in premium content environments, where intent is forged and fortified. These are the exact environments which command the upper end of B2B CPMs, and they go un-auctioned
End users, with our B2B lens on, often buying committee members in global accounts see garbage bottom-filler ads which detract from the user experience and are a distracting irrelevance, pushing them away from premium sites and spending less time in the open internet.
That distinction, between full-throttle data enabled monetisation and blocked signal, matters because it explains the slow bleed that premium publishers have lived through since regulators forced “Reject all” to sit level with “Accept all”. The audience did not disappear. The ability to monetise it did.
Privacy and AI have been the bedfellows of doom for the publishing world, so any walk-back on the incredibly stringent rules is potentially the most significant development since privacy rules were introduced with GDPR - because it is the first signs of a reversal in its direction of travel.
On 18 May 2026 the Information Commissioner’s Office published formal advice to government proposing that a defined set of low-risk advertising functions could run without consent under PECR. Of all the privacy laws, PECR is the most arduous, and a strict interpretation of it would essentially render programmatic advertising as an industry as illegal.
This new formal advice went out, unglamorously, in a letter to a digital minister and a Treasury secretary, and most of the trade press filed it under compliance housekeeping. I think that is a mistake. Strip away the legalese and this is the first time in roughly a decade that a major Western privacy regulator has moved deliberately to widen, rather than narrow, what addressable advertising is allowed to do. The ratchet that only ever turned one way just slipped a tooth.
This piece is about why that slip is a bigger deal for B2B than for anyone else, and what it signals about the direction of travel for privacy itself.
What you’ll learn in this article
Why premium publishers, the lifeblood of the open web, have been squeezed from two directions at once, and the numbers behind the squeeze
Exactly what the ICO has proposed, the seven functions it would exempt, and the narrow set of signals that could flow without consent
The category error at the heart of PECR: why the rules taxed anonymous context and individual surveillance at the same rate
Why B2B has the most to gain, given an audience that is overwhelmingly anonymous, out-of-market and company-level
Which specific B2B-relevant signals could become addressable without consent, and where the hard limits sit
What the move tells us about a privacy movement that, until now, has only known one direction
The two-front squeeze on the open web
Premium content publishers are the substrate the open web is built on. They are also the part of the ecosystem that has taken the heaviest fire over the last five years, from two directions that arrived more or less simultaneously.
The first front is privacy compliance. Once cookie banners were forced to offer a genuine, equally weighted rejection, people used it. The exact rejection rate is contested and varies wildly by banner design and sector, which is itself telling, but the direction is not in doubt.
UK publisher data collected by Press Gazette puts consent rates somewhere around 70 to 80 percent when accept and reject are presented evenly, so a fifth to a third of visitors opting out.
Rhe above is for the UK only, and the data I have seen, aggregated across billions of B2B vendor and publisher page loads captured by the FunnelFuel analytics, makes for much bleaker reading. My data is more in-line with broader academic and industry reviews find that with a properly presented “Reject all” button, something closer to half to two-thirds of users now decline, and that a compliant banner can mean 40 to 70 percent fewer tracking data points. German analytics firm etracker reports that a legally compliant design sees consent refused on around 60 percent of visits. Whatever the precise figure on a given site, a large and growing slice of premium audience became, in programmatic terms, invisible.
The industry’s workaround, consent or pay, tells you how acute the pain became. Sixteen of the fifty biggest UK news sites now ask users to either accept tracking or pay a subscription, and once that choice is introduced almost everyone accepts. It creates 2 problems though; one - according to Content Ignite, this creates a negative sentiment amongst users, and more concerningly, the ICO has confirmed those models can be lawful there’s clearly an interpretation that it is in-fact unlawful to do this. It is a revealing fix. Publishers were effectively charging users for the privilege of declining to be tracked, because the alternative was watching half their inventory lose its value. I am all for it, and 76% of users agree with me that publishers deserve to get paid for their work (see Content Ignite link above)
The second front that publishers are fighting is the collapse of the referral economy itself. While privacy rules were thinning the value of each impression, AI-driven search was thinning the number of impressions. Zero-click search, where a user gets the answer and never leaves the results page, now accounts for roughly 60 percent of Google queries, and on news-related searches Similarweb data puts it at 69 percent in the year after AI Overviews launched. The same analysis found Google search traffic to publishers fell about a third globally in the year to November 2025. Pew Research found that when an AI Overview appears, only 8 percent of users click a traditional result, against 15 percent when it does not, and barely 1 percent click the sources cited inside the answer. Ahrefs measured a 58 percent fall in click-through for top-ranking pages on queries that trigger an Overview. Publishers have been unusually candid about losing 20, 30, in some cases 90 percent of their traffic, and some have already closed.
Now hold those two fronts next to a third structural fact: the money was already concentrating elsewhere. Walled gardens capture 70 to 80 percent of programmatic spend and around 78 percent of global digital ad revenue, a share Statista expects to reach 83 percent by 2027. Yet people spend more than half their online time on the open web - and I have long sinced argued that advertising investments over-value walled gardens and under-value the cheaper and more plentiful attention that still exists in the open web environments, all the more so when you factor new facets of it, from podcasts to TV. Advertisers put only 20 to 30 percent of budget where audiences spend 55 to 60 percent of their attention. The squeeze on premium publishers, in other words, is not a market correcting. It is a market being pushed further out of balance by rules that made the open web harder to monetise at exactly the moment AI made it harder to reach.
That is the backdrop against which the ICO’s letter should be read.
Below is how the ICO’s proposal works, the signals to watch, and what it means for your targeting.