Link: https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/21/the-verge-news-publishers-take-paywall-blocker-12ft-io-offline/

12ft.io was a clever service that exploited the fact that paywalls allowed Google to crawl their articles. By licking the boots of Google’s crawler, paywalls pollute the search index with their exclusive/closed content. Enshitification culminates by cluttering our search results with paywalls.

12ft.io gave people direct access to Google’s caches, so we could read the text that feeds Google’s index.

☠ 12ft.io is apparently dead now. “404 page not found”. wtf. We just lost an important disenshification mechanism. The linked news hit ~½ a year ago, but seems to have taken some time to actually play out.

(update)

Call to action: someone plz make an onion replacement for 12ft.io.

smry.ai is said to be the best 12ft.io alternative. But I just tried it and simply got a text version of the paywall registration nag. Same with https://removepaywalls.com/