Cloaking
Cloaking is showing search engines one version of a page and people another, to game rankings and mislead visitors. Google's spam policies give an example: travel tips for Google's crawler, discount drugs for people. A paywall isn't cloaking, Google says, if Google sees the full content a paying reader gets and the site follows its paywall rules.
Source: Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search (Cloaking), checked October 29, 2026
What Cloaking means for your business
Some tools hand AI crawlers their own copy of a page. If that copy says things the real page doesn't, it starts to match what Google's policy describes. Google also warns that hackers sometimes use cloaking on sites they break into, so the owner sees a normal page while Google sees something else.
Google's page on dynamic rendering, an older fix for sites built with JavaScript, draws the line. Googlebot generally doesn't count it as cloaking when the bot version carries similar content, but showing cats to people and dogs to crawlers would be.
We'd keep one version of your facts. If a bot copy exists, it should match the page, with the same prices, hours and services. A page that people and crawlers can both read as it stands is the build we'd choose.
If a plugin or vendor set up a separate version of your site for bots and you're not sure what it shows, checking what crawlers actually see on your pages is where we'd look.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview led with the dictionary meaning, then gave SEO, ad fraud, dating and physics meanings, citing dictionaries, Wikipedia, Vice and YouTube. ChatGPT also listed several meanings, put SEO first and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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