Automatic Google Tag Loading in GTM: What It Changes

A Silent but Significant Change

Since April 2025, Google Tag Manager containers that include Google Ads or Floodlight tags automatically load a Google Tag. This behavior is active by default, without any action on your part. If you have a Google Ads conversion tag or a Floodlight tag in your container, an additional Google Tag now executes in the background.

This Google Tag automatically enables several features: Enhanced Conversions, automatic events (outbound clicks, file downloads, scroll), and “User Provided Data” collection.

What Activates Without Your Intervention

Enhanced Conversions collects and hashes user data visible on the page (email, phone, address) and sends it to Google Ads. This feature improves conversion matching, particularly useful in a context of increasing cookie restrictions.

Automatic events capture standard interactions without manual configuration. This is convenient, but it can create duplicates if you had already configured these events manually in your container.

“User Provided Data” collection is the most sensitive point. The Google Tag can detect and collect email addresses present in your page’s forms, even without explicit configuration on your part. This data is hashed before sending, but the processing does occur.

Implications for Consent

From a GDPR perspective, automatic collection of personal data without deliberate configuration raises questions. If your Consent Mode implementation is correct, data is only sent after consent. But your CMP must properly cover these new data flows.

The main risk concerns implementations where Consent Mode is not deployed or is misconfigured. In such cases, hashed personal data is potentially sent to Google without a legal basis.

It is also important to verify that your privacy policy mentions this collection. If you had not explicitly configured Enhanced Conversions, your users have probably not been informed of this processing.

How to Verify and Control

Open GTM Preview Mode and examine the tags that fire on page load. If you see a Google Tag you did not create, it is the automatic loading.

To disable this behavior, go to your GTM container settings, “Google Tag” section. You can disable automatic loading and regain full control over which tags execute.

Also check the Network panel in Chrome DevTools for outgoing requests to google.com/pagead/ or googleads.g.doubleclick.net/. The presence of em= parameters (hashed email) confirms that user data collection is active.

Best Practices to Adopt

Audit your GTM container to identify potential duplicates between your manual tags and automatic events. Document active data flows, including those generated automatically. And above all, ensure your CMP and Consent Mode cover all processing, including what you did not configure yourself.