How to avoid paywalls and pop-ups hiding your content
Paywalls and sign-in interstitials in the initial HTML hide your content from crawlers and AI assistants. Serve the article text on first render so crawlers can read it, and if you must gate content, mark the gated part with isAccessibleForFree structured data to stay within Google guidelines.
By ratemysite.ai editorial team. Updated .
How do you fix it?
- Load the page with curl and check that the full article text is in the HTML, not an overlay or login form.
- Remove full-screen cookie, newsletter and sign-in overlays from the first render; use a small banner instead.
- If part of the content is paid, show a preview with real text and mark the gated section in structured data.
- Add isAccessibleForFree false and a cssSelector for the gated block in the Article JSON-LD.
- Re-run the audit and confirm the No interstitial check passes.
What is an interstitial?
An interstitial is a screen that appears between the visitor and the content, such as a sign-in wall, a newsletter pop-up or a full-page cookie notice. When it sits in the page HTML, a crawler reads the overlay instead of the article. Google has penalized intrusive mobile interstitials since 2017, and AI crawlers that read the first response get no content at all from pages that open with a wall.
How do I gate content honestly?
Serve crawlers and visitors the same content, and use markup to describe what is gated. In Article JSON-LD, set isAccessibleForFree to false and give a hasPart entry with a cssSelector that points to the paid section. This tells Google the paywall is legitimate and not cloaking. For anything free, remove the wall: delay pop-ups until the visitor has scrolled at least 50% of the page or stayed for 30 seconds, and make them easy to close.
How much does this check matter?
- This check is worth about 2.4% of the overall score.
- A finished report is reused for 24 hours before you can re-analyze it.
- Each page is fetched with a timeout of 10 seconds, and HTML larger than 2 MB is not audited.
What else do people ask?
- Will a cookie banner count as an interstitial?
- A small banner is fine. A full-screen overlay that covers the content or blocks the page until accepted is the problem.
- Can I show a free preview?
- Yes. A preview of the first few paragraphs is useful, as long as the gated part is marked so engines do not treat it as cloaking.