No login or paywall blocks the content. Whatever is behind a wall does not exist to a crawler.
The check fetches your priority pages without cookies and looks for a login form, a paywall, a cookie gate that hides the content, or an interstitial standing in for the page.
Whatever is behind a wall does not exist to a crawler. A product page that shows a cookie interstitial instead of the product, a pricing page that needs a login, a guide that is a teaser plus a paywall — each is a page AI cannot read and therefore cannot cite.
Open the page in a private window with JavaScript off and cookies cleared. What you see is roughly what a fetcher sees. If the content is not there, neither is it for AI.
What AI actually sees → — free, no signup.
What the agent does: a wall is a decision about your business, not a switch; the agent points at the exact page and what blocks it.
Part of the 23 checks · group: Crawler access — robots.txt, CDN/bot filter, login walls, noindex, HTTP status, sitemap, canonical.
Only when it replaces the page. A banner overlaid on visible content is fine; a full-screen gate that hides the content until accepted is read as an empty page.
No — the priority pages the check fetched: the homepage and the handful of pages it reads on every run. The agent on the site sees every page.
The page check reads your public pages from outside and runs all 22 — free, no signup, no AI engine involved.