The age gate must come before the restricted content, not after it
The requirementstatement
The age gate must be presented before any age-restricted content is accessible, including on a page reached by a direct link.
- Severityseverity
- BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
- When it bitesphase
- Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
- What is checkedobject
- page flow ordering
- Where it liveslayer
- WebsiteWEBSITE
- How Ekas settles itdetectability
- AI · crawlCRAWL
- Needs your live site or policy page fetched and read. Ekas crawls it the way a reviewer would.
- What the fix involvesfailureClass
- Fix the websiteTERMINAL_WEBSITE
- The fix lives on your site. No amount of rewording the form clears it.
- Who requires itauthorities
- TwilioAerialink
- When it appliesapplicabilityText
- Applies to every 10DLC registration.
Why this rule existsrationale
A gate that appears after the visitor has already seen the product has protected nobody — the harm the rule addresses happened on page load. The usual cause is a gate wired into the home page template only, so every deep link from a message, a search result or a QR code lands past it.
How to fix itremediation
Enforce the gate on every restricted URL rather than on the home page, and check the answer server-side before the page renders. Done when pasting a product URL into a fresh browser shows the gate first.
Common mistakespitfalls
- For a QR opt-in the date of birth must be captured before consent is collected, not on the confirmation step — a gate after the number has been submitted is too late for both requirements.
Provider rejection codescodes
The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.
| Provider | Code | Resubmit |
|---|---|---|
| Twiliogen2 | 30956 | Yes |
Notesnotes
Conditional on age-restricted content being present, the same condition as WEB-107, and carried in the criteria for the same reason: tagging on the declared ageGated attribute would exempt exactly the brands that under-declare.
Rules you will hit next
Other website rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.
WEB-001A brand website URL is requiredBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-009The website must resolve and return contentBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-012A parked or for-sale domain is not a websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-013A pre-launch placeholder is not a websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-014Staging, admin and internal hosts must not be the brand websiteBlockingBLOCKINGWEB-016The website must be machine-crawlableBlockingBLOCKING
WEB-109 is one of 93 website rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.