Search without paywalls

Wren is a search engine that leaves out sites you would have to pay or sign up to read. Not ranked lower — absent. This page says what that has meant so far.

The one test

Before a site is indexed it has to pass one question: can a first-time visitor read this page right now, without paying and without creating an account? We load a few pages from the site in a headless browser — articles where we could find them, otherwise the homepage — logged out, with no ad blocker, and write down what happened. How a site gets measured.

Payment (gate G1) and an account (G2) are two of the walls that fail it. The others are a popup on load or first click, a full-screen box with no way past it, sound-on autoplay, more than 30% of a sampled screen taken by ads, and deception. The gates, in full.

What the test has found

A site is excluded when at least half of the pages we sampled fail; a tie goes to the stricter verdict. “Not measured” is absence of evidence, not a verdict either way. Card file built 2026-10-17.

Excluded on paywall evidence

Of the 141 sites excluded on a payment or account gate, 28 are named here: those where a person reviewed the wall, where our browser met it, or where the publisher’s own markup says the article is not free and a paywall vendor’s script loads with it.

107 rest on weaker signals: that markup alone, sometimes on a page that showed us the whole article, or our crawler being sent more text than our browser. They stay excluded and keep their report cards, but we do not call them paywalled here.

6 more have machine evidence a person has not yet checked, so we hold back their names until someone has. They stay excluded and keep their report cards.

Most-cited first, by the number of Wikipedia pages that link to the site. Each site links to its report card, with the date and what we found.

G1: hard paywall — the content requires payment. G2: hard registration wall — no content at all without an account. The gates listed are every one that tripped on any sampled page, plus the one a reviewer recorded. Wrong about your site? Verify it and request a new measurement, or tell us. Confirmed mistakes are published on corrections.

Excluded for something else

110 sites showed no payment or account wall but failed one of the other gates.

A site that tripped two gates is counted under both.

What this page does not say

• It covers the sites we have measured, chosen mostly by how often Wikipedia links to them. Some well-known subscription sites have no completed measurement at all, among them nytimes.com, wsj.com, washingtonpost.com. A site missing from these lists may simply not have been measured. Look up a site.
• Where we could find only a homepage to check, a site that walls its articles can pass if its homepage is open.
• Each verdict rests on a few sampled pages, and sites change. Some measurements are wrong; corrections lists the ones we have confirmed.
• Readable is not the same as pleasant. How a readable site treats you is the grade’s job: the best-read sites, and how the grade works.

About Wren · Search the readable web