Cloaking

Cloaking is a deceptive SEO technique where a website shows one version of a page to search engine crawlers and another to the people who visit it. The server recognizes the crawler by its user agent or IP address and serves a specially optimized version, while human visitors see something else entirely.

The purpose is to win rankings the real content could never carry. The crawler is fed a long, keyword-dense text, and the visitor lands on a thin sales page with nothing behind it.

Cloaking breaks Google's spam policies directly. When the systems or a human reviewer catch the difference, the result can be a manual action that strips the pages of their rankings or removes them from the index altogether. As with other forms of black hat SEO, the gain is short and the bill is long.

Not every difference between crawler and visitor counts as cloaking. Geo-adaptation, language versions, personalized recommendations and paywalls with correct markup are all acceptable, as long as crawler and user meet substantially the same content. The line is intent: adapting the experience for the user sits on safe ground, hiding something from either the machine or the person does not. AI crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot changed nothing there: what a model quotes you for has to match what visitors read. Google's rules sit in the guide to search engine guidelines.