Age verification and Googlebot
Age verification for adult sites is now law in a growing number of places. In the US, the Supreme Court upheld Texas's age-verification law in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in June 2025, and similar laws apply in other states. The UK's Online Safety Act requires highly effective age checks too.
From an SEO point of view, the question is simple: what does a crawler get? Google's documentation says Googlebot's default IP addresses appear to be in the US, that it also crawls from other countries, and that you should treat Googlebot the way you treat any visitor from the same location. Serving it something different is cloaking.
So the work is not about getting around verification. It is about making the page a visitor sees before verifying worth indexing on its own: a clear description of the page, safe text and images, and links to other public pages. Platforms that show crawlers only a blank gate lose those pages from search.