Gated content
Gated content is anything on your site people can only read after they hand over details, usually an email address, through a form.
Gated content is anything on your website that people can only read after they fill in a form, usually with their name and email address. Think of reports, guides, templates and webinar recordings. Marketers gate content to collect leads: the reader gets the report, and you get a way to contact them.
The trade-off is reach. Every form you put in front of a page means fewer people read it, and fewer people share it or link to it.
Search engines and AI bots can't fill in forms
A crawler reads the page it's given. It doesn't type an email address into your form and wait for the download. So whatever sits behind the gate is invisible to search engines and to the bots the AI platforms send to read the web.
That matters more in AI search. When someone asks an AI platform a question, it can only quote and cite pages it was able to read. Your best research might answer the question perfectly, but if it lives in a PDF behind a form, the platform will quote a competitor's blog post that summarised it instead.
Gate less, or gate part of it
You don't have to choose between leads and visibility. Many teams publish an open page with the main findings, the key numbers and a clear summary, and keep the full report or the raw data behind the form.
For example, say Harrow & Pine publishes a survey of 500 café owners. The open page states the five main findings in plain sentences, with the figures. The full 40-page report stays gated. Now an AI platform can read and cite the findings, readers can see why the report is worth their email address, and the form still collects leads.
In AnswerOrbit
To check what a bot can read on one of your pages, open it in the Pages tab in Website. You'll see What a person sees next to What a bot reads, with any blocks bots miss marked Hidden from bots. See Website and AI traffic.