Like most message board-centric college football websites, On3’s business model relies heavily on subscriptions, which means writers and insiders often put information behind paywalls, accessible only to paying subscribers. However, in 2025, those paywalls face a new threat: AI.
With the college football transfer portal season in full swing, On3 has been providing regular updates on the highly-coveted players in the portal, routinely keeping the latest information from their insiders behind a paywall. However, X users have been increasingly turning to AI chatbot Grok to get past these kinds of paywalls, much to the frustration of some college football writers.
Just a few days ago, the On3 X account shared an article from insider Pete Nakos predicting where the top transfer portal targets will ultimately commit. More than half of the replies were from users asking Grok to give them the information in the paywalled article.
“Shoutout to grok because I ain’t never paying for a subscription again,” one user wrote.
In some more recent posts, On3 seemingly found a way to combat this trend by simply turning off the comments on some of their X posts.
On Monday evening, On3 shared an update on Auburn transfer wide receiver Cam Coleman, who is ranked as the top player in the transfer portal this cycle. The article teased that one team had removed itself from the pursuit of the elite wide receiver, but On3 intentionally hid the name of that team behind a paywall. On3 also turned off the replies to the X post, presumably to prevent Grok from getting past the paywall, as a few X users pointed out.
On3 made a similar move earlier on Thursday when it turned off the replies on an X post teasing the top contender for Auburn transfer quarterback, Deuce Knight. Instead, On3 used the replies to advertise a 50% off sale on a subscription.
It’s not clear how exactly Grok gets past these paywalls, but it is worth noting that the AI chatbot is often incorrect, especially when that information comes from a message board post and not a full article. For example, one user tried to use Grok to get the latest information on Coleman and got four different responses – three of which were incorrect.
Sometimes, though, Grok does give the correct answer, especially when the information has already been aggregated and shared by other free sources.
Regardless, On3 clearly wanted to avoid a long stream of replies asking Grok to help them bypass the paywall, and it’s likely we’ll see this continue through the transfer portal cycle.
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