Why publishing in GTM broke your tracking
It all worked in Preview, you hit Publish, and now live tracking is down. The gap between Preview and live is exactly where this happens, and there are only a few usual culprits.
Why live differs from Preview
- You published a different version than the one you tested, or published an unfinished workspace.
- A paused or deleted tag went live in that state.
- Consent gating behaves differently for real visitors than for you in Preview, where you accepted. See Preview works but not live.
- A trigger that depended on Preview conditions (debug mode, your IP) does not match real traffic.
How to recover
Open the GTM version history, confirm what actually went live, and if needed roll back to the last known-good version in one click, then fix forward. Afterwards, test the published container (not just Preview) with a clean browser and declined consent, so you catch this before your visitors do.
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