By default the banner is shown to everyone, everywhere. You can narrow that on the Settings tab under Who gets asked.
Show the banner to
- Everyone, everywhere. The default, and the simplest to explain.
- The EU, the EEA, the UK and Switzerland only.
- Those, plus US states with an opt-out law. The plugin carries its own list of those states. A US visitor whose state cannot be seen is treated as covered.
Where the country comes from
From a header your own hosting setup already adds: Cloudflare's CF-IPCountry, CloudFront's viewer country, an nginx or Apache GeoIP module, or WooCommerce's own geolocation if you run a shop. The plugin never sends a visitor's IP address to an outside lookup service.
The Settings screen tells you, live, what it can see: either the country your own request is coming from, or that no country header is reaching WordPress. If none is reaching it and you are not behind Cloudflare or a similar service, leave the setting on Everyone.
When the country is unknown
Choose Ask anyway (safer), the default, or Do not ask.
Outside your regions
A visitor from a country you chose not to ask sees no banner, and scripts run as they would without the plugin. Nothing is recorded for them, because nothing was asked. The region check is a small separate request made by the visitor's browser, so it works correctly behind a page cache.
Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track
Honour Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track is on by default. A visitor whose browser sends one of these signals has already refused. They are recorded as a refusal (shown as Browser signal in the Consent log), everything optional stays held, and they are not interrupted with a banner. If the reopen button is on, they can still open the choices panel and opt in.
Logged-in editors
Do not block anything for logged-in editors and administrators is off by default. It is handy while building, but with it on you are not seeing what your visitors see.
Checking your own request
The Diagnostics tab has a Country header row and a This request would row, which says whether your current request would see the banner.