cloaking

How Google spots it

Cloaking works by branching on the request. A server checks the User-Agent string or the visitor’s IP, then serves keyword-stuffed or off-topic HTML to Googlebot while people get something else. Google’s own examples are blunt: a page about travel destinations for crawlers and discount drugs for users, or text that only appears when the requester is a search engine.

Not every difference is cloaking. Serving content by country, running A/B tests, or operating a paywall is fine as long as the intent is not to deceive and the crawler can reach the same content a subscriber sees (Google asks you to mark paywalled content with structured data). The line is intent plus parity: does the bot get a materially different page than the human?

In 2026 the policy widened. On May 15, 2026 Google updated its spam rules to state they apply across all of Search, including attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google and Bing had already signaled that keeping a separate stripped-down page just for AI crawlers counts as cloaking too. So the “make a clean markdown copy for the LLMs” trick is a policy risk, not a shortcut.

The consequence is concrete. “Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects” is a named manual action in Search Console. Once applied, the affected pages lose visibility until you remove the conditional serving, confirm the fix with the URL Inspection tool, and pass a reconsideration request.