Consent is a choice, not a measurement strategy

The short version

Consent is an important relationship between a visitor and a business. It is not, by itself, a useful definition of traffic.

When analytics only starts after a visitor agrees, the report inherits the shape of that decision. That can be appropriate for some tools, but teams should understand the coverage they are looking at.

Keeping a separate aggregated baseline makes the distinction clearer: consent controls personal tracking, while privacy-safe measurement answers the operational question of how the site is being used.