Google's John Mueller said on Twitter the other day that Google's crawlers, GoogleBot, crawls the web stateless, i.e. without cookies. This is something Google has said many times over the years, but I don't think I ever covered this basic fact.
No, Google generally crawls stateless, no cookies used.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 12, 2017
Of course, John used the qualifying word "generally." Why, because Google may sometimes try to crawl other ways to get to content it might not otherwise be able to get to.
But in general, if you are an SEO, you want to make sure your content is accessible without cookies. You should also know that using cookies will not 100% prevent Google from accessing your content.
Got it?
Forum discussion at Twitter.