They used to allow crawlers and Twitter and some other links through, but they're almost entirely behind a paywall now.links through Facebook or Twitter may still work, but they definitely do not work through Google anymore.

I blocked them from my Google feed as well as numerous other ones. I'm not going to pay to see ads

I’ve seen other sites that do the same, it’s as if they just have a paywall permanently now and only say you can get a few free articles rather than mean it.

You can never seem to trick it even if you want to...

... it's almost like their server knows you're a person and not a crawler