Documentation

ClearGate is an age gate, not age verification: visitors confirm their own age, and ClearGate does not check identity documents or data.

• Setup
• Rules
• Appearance
• Languages
• SEO and performance
• Known limitations

Setup

1. Install ClearGate from the Shopify App Store.
2. Choose the ClearGate Pro plan when Shopify asks.
3. On the app's Home page, press Turn on in theme editor. The theme editor opens with the ClearGate age gate app embed.
4. Switch the app embed on and press Save in the theme editor. The Home page then shows that the age gate is turned on in your theme.
5. Press Set up rules to choose who sees the gate. With no saved rules the gate works with the defaults: every page, minimum age 18, remembered for 30 days.

Rules

Open the Rules page from the app's Home page.

Age gate

• Show the age gate: the master switch. Turn it off to pause the gate without removing your rules.
• Where the gate appears: either “Everywhere except the pages I exclude”, or “Only on the collections, product types and pages I choose” (targeted mode).

Pages

• Excluded pages: the gate never appears on these, in either mode. A path such as /pages/about matches that page only. Ending a path with /*, like /blogs/*, covers the path and everything below it.
• In targeted mode you also choose Included pages, Collections (press “Select collections”) and Product types. The gate then appears on those pages, on collection pages for the chosen collections, on products in those collections or of those types, and on every page while the cart holds one of those products. Excluded pages still win.
• Paths are written without a language or Markets prefix. A path such as /products/x also matches /en-us/products/x. The gate never shows on the store password page.

Age requirements

• Minimum age: used for every country without its own age. Between 13 and 99.
• Age by country: choose a country, set its minimum age and press Add. The gate uses the country the visitor is shopping from in your store's Markets set-up. It can also make one best-effort request to Shopify to detect the visitor's country, and only ever raises the age that is shown, never lowers it.
• Strict mode: ask for the highest age you have set, everywhere, instead of the age for the visitor's country.

Visitor answers

• Remember a Yes answer for: this browsing session only, 7, 30 or 90 days. A visitor who confirmed 18 is asked again on a page that needs 21.
• When a visitor answers No: “Show a message”, or “Send them to another page” (enter an https:// address or a path on your store under “Redirect to”).
• Remember a No answer: the visitor keeps seeing the No result for the time above instead of being asked again.

Appearance

Appearance is set in the theme editor, in the settings of the “ClearGate age gate” app embed.

• Preview gate in theme editor: shows the gate in the editor. The editor ignores the visitor cookie and never saves one.
• Style: “Match my theme” (reads colours, corner radius and button look from your theme), “Light”, “Dark” or “Custom”.
• Logo and Logo width (40 to 300 px).
• Backdrop: Backdrop colour, Backdrop opacity (0 to 100%) and an optional Backdrop image, which the backdrop colour tints.
• Frosted glass: blurs the page behind a see-through backdrop. It works best with backdrop opacity around 40 to 70%. Browsers without blur support, and visitors who ask for reduced transparency, get a solid backdrop.
• Card colour, Text colour, Button colour and Button text colour: used only when Style is Custom.
• Corner radius (0 to 32 px). With Match my theme, the theme's own radius is used when it can be found.
• Card width (320 to 560 px): the widest the card gets. On smaller screens it fits the screen instead.
• Layout: Card (default) or Full screen. Full screen fills the whole screen with the card colour; Card width then sets the width of the content. With Frosted card, the whole screen is frosted.
• Card padding (16 to 48 px): the space between the card's edge and its content. On phones it's at most 24 px.
• Frosted card: a see-through card that blurs what's behind it, with Light, Dark or Custom. It looks best with a backdrop image or a lower backdrop opacity. Browsers without blur support, and visitors who ask for reduced transparency, get a solid card.

If the colours you pick are hard to read, the app's Home page shows a “Low colour contrast in the age gate” warning.

Languages

The gate shows the heading, body text, Yes and No buttons and the message after No in the visitor's language. Set your own wording per language under “Gate text” on the Rules page (press “Add a language” for each language your store is published in). Use {age} where the required age should appear.

Footer text is optional small print under the buttons, for example a legal or responsible-drinking notice. {age} works here too. A language without its own footer shows the primary language's footer.

Any other field you leave empty falls back to the built-in text. ClearGate includes built-in text for 31 language versions, including English. When a language has no built-in text, the English text is used.

SEO and performance

These results come from our own tests on 30 October 2026, on seven themes (Dawn, Horizon, Prestige, Impulse, Symmetry, Broadcast and Impact) on development stores.

• Your content stays in the page. While the gate shows, the page's own content is still in the page. It is marked inert (not reachable by keyboard or screen reader), not removed.
• The gate's text is kept out of the page content. It sits in a <template> and the gate container has data-nosnippet, which tells Google not to use its text in snippets. The gate has no <h1>, so your page's own heading stays the main heading.
• Search tags are unchanged. Title, meta description, canonical URL, hreflang links and Open Graph tags were identical with the gate on and off, and the page body markup was identical.
• Lighthouse SEO score: the same with the gate on and off, on every page and theme tested.
• Speed: on every page tested, the Lighthouse performance score with the gate on a first visit was within 10 points of the score with it off, which is Built for Shopify's limit for the storefront. We read this as no measurable cost, not as a speed-up. A returning visitor only runs a cookie check.
• Weight: with default settings the gate adds about 4.8 KB of inline JavaScript, 1.8 KB of CSS and about 1 KB of data and template to a gated page. It makes no network requests of its own, other than your logo or backdrop image and the optional location request when you set ages per country.
• No layout shift from the gate in our tests. On some themes on phones, the gate's text can be what Lighthouse counts as the largest paint on a first visit, because the gate waits up to 2 seconds for the theme's font so the card doesn't move.

Not yet tested

• Google Search Console URL Inspection and the link preview tools of Facebook, LinkedIn and X (they can't reach password-protected development stores).
• Real Safari and VoiceOver.
• The frosted glass blur in Firefox and Safari. We confirmed it in Chromium only.
• Real devices and networks. The speed numbers come from Lighthouse simulation on one computer.

Known limitations

• In targeted mode, quick-add buttons and cart drawers can add a gated product without the visitor opening a gated page, and they can then reach checkout. A self-declared age gate can't stop that.
• Safari limits cookies set by scripts to 7 days. Safari visitors may be asked again after 7 days, whatever “Remember a Yes answer for” says.
• With JavaScript turned off in the browser there is no gate.
• ClearGate doesn't give legal advice. You decide which ages and pages are right for your store and your customers.

ClearGate is an age gate, not age verification: visitors confirm their own age, and ClearGate does not check identity documents or data.