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User's avatar
Ben's avatar

Thanks for this - I've been looking at this on The Telegraph.

It looks like "isAccessibleForFree": true tracks the JS system state, so it remains false if the user hasn't triggered the modal and becomes true if they have. Have I understood that correctly?

Does that not risk Google seeing different things from crawl, their own rendering and users logged into Chrome? Should metered content not always have "isAccessibleForFree": false on the basis that it is not always unconditionally available for free?

Harry Clarkson-Bennett's avatar

Sorry Ben, this is so late, I completely missed it!

You have and I personally think this is a grey area. Google doesn't have explicit advice for dynamic paywalls where a vast proportion of our audience can access it for free. However, i think we tried to be too clever (although I should state the implementation not on me). We've discussed it, it's in a backlog but low enough priority it would probably never get changed

So unnecessary, but doesn't seem to have impacted paywalled states in GSC. But for future reference I would just use false...