Classic cloaking examples include showing a crawler a keyword-stuffed, text-heavy page while human visitors see a completely different page (often one built around ads or an unrelated product), or detecting a crawler's user-agent and serving it optimized content while regular visitors get thin or low-quality content. The key distinction between cloaking and legitimate practices like A/B testing or personalization is intent and degree: showing different users different marketing copy based on location is normal; showing the crawler a fundamentally different page than any human ever sees is cloaking. Detected cloaking typically results in a manual action and, in severe or repeated cases, can lead to a site being removed from the index entirely.
Example
A site serves crawlers a keyword-rich text version of a page while human visitors see a JavaScript-heavy interactive tool with none of that text — flagged and manually actioned after a user report.
Related terms
Related terms
Related Reading
404 Error
A 404 error is the standard HTTP status code returned when a requested page doesn't exist on the server — the classic 'page not found' response.
A/B Testing (SEO)
A/B testing in SEO is the practice of showing two versions of a page element — usually a title tag, meta description, or on-page element — to see which one earns a better click-through rate or ranking outcome.
AI Citation
An AI citation happens when an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini references or links to a specific page as the source for part of its answer.
