Age verification is non-negotiable for a cannabis site in New York. Built wrong, it's also the fastest way to disappear from Google. Here's how to do both — gate your visitors and keep your rankings.
Googlebot can't click “I'm 21.” If your gate redirects every visitor to a separate verification page before the content loads, Google indexes that blank page — and your real pages fall out of search.
Serve the full page in the HTML response and lay the age gate over it with a CSS/JS overlay that sets a cookie on “Yes.” The content is in the page for the crawler; the gate is there for humans. No redirect, no lost rankings.
A gate that pops in late causes layout shift and slow interaction — both are ranking signals. Load it cleanly so it doesn't drag your scores.
One more thing: don't detect Googlebot and serve it a different page. That's cloaking, a penalty of its own. Overlay-without-redirect keeps you clean.
Building or fixing a cannabis site? Here's how we help.
Source: Google Search Central guidance on interstitials and Core Web Vitals. For persons 21 and older. Not legal advice.
