<b>The paywall field that keeps you out of the cloaking penalty box</b>

<b>The paywall field that keeps you out of the cloaking penalty box</b>

If you gate content, <code>isAccessibleForFree: false</code> plus a <code>hasPart</code> with <code>cssSelector</code> marking the paywalled region is how you legitimately show Googlebot full content while users hit a paywall — without it being cloaking. Skip this markup and serving bot-vs-user differently is exactly the cloaking Google penalizes.

The nuance — the <code>cssSelector</code> must precisely bound the gated section so Google knows what's free vs paid. It applies to <code>Article</code>, <code>NewsArticle</code>, and <code>CreativeWork</code> alike.

What it means for you — any subscription or member-gated publisher needs this to stay compliant AND keep indexing full text. It's the rare bit of schema that's a legal-safety net, not just a rich-result enabler.

Watch this: as AI crawlers negotiate paywalls, accurate free/paid boundaries become a licensing and access signal too.