Skip to main content
Some visitors need to be out of every experiment. A member of your QA team, a support agent looking at a customer’s cart, a lawyer testing a checkout flow, or anybody who explicitly asks not to participate. ABTestly ships an opt-out URL that handles all of those.

​
The URLs to share

Both of these URLs live in your Settings → Opt-out panel with a copy button next to each:
  • https://YOURSITE.com/?abtestly_optout=1, opt this browser out.
  • https://YOURSITE.com/?abtestly_optout=0, opt this browser back in.
Opt-out settings

Settings → Opt-out. Copy either URL and share it with the visitor.

The visitor loads either URL once. The snippet reads the query parameter, writes a cookie, and that decision sticks for two years or until the visitor clears their browser data.

​
What “opt out” actually does

An opted-out visitor:
  • Never gets bucketed into any experiment. Existing bucket cache is cleared.
  • Never has variant CSS or JavaScript applied.
  • Never sends an exposure or a goal beacon to ABTestly.
The visitor still browses your site normally. Only the ABTestly runtime stops firing.
  • Cookie name: __abtestly_optout
  • Value: 1
  • Domain: your effective top-level plus one (eTLD+1), so it covers www.acme.com, app.acme.com, and any other subdomain of your site.
  • Max age: two years.
The snippet fails closed. If it cannot verify that the cookie was written, the browser rejected it, the domain is a raw IP, whatever the reason, the current pageview is still suppressed. It errs on the side of respecting the opt-out even when it cannot remember it for next time. The same applies in reverse. An opt-back-in request that could not clear the cookie leaves the visitor opted out.

​
Preview vs opt-out

The preview modal can override the runtime for QA purposes, but a preview link cannot swallow the opt-out URL. If a visitor clicks the opt-out URL you gave them, they are opted out even if they later use a preview link, as they should be.

​
Why not the browser’s Do Not Track header

Do Not Track is not enforced anywhere and most browsers no longer send it. A URL your visitor can click is something you can point them to, share in an email, or put in a support macro. If you also use consent gating, for example, deferred mode with a consentKey, the two mechanisms compose. The snippet does not fire until both apply: consent is granted and the visitor is not opted out.