Cloaking

Cloaking is serving different content under the same URL depending on whether the visitor looks like a search bot or a real user. The classic pattern is keyword-stuffed pages for bots and ads or off-site redirects for humans.

Google's spam policies prohibit cloaking explicitly and it is a manual-action target. Intentional cloaking is plain black hat, but accidental cloaking is also a real failure mode — misconfigured bot middleware or geo/device branching that responds differently to crawlers can trip the same wire.

The practical guardrail is to compare the rendered HTML in GSC's URL Inspection with what the live browser sees. Any meaningful divergence should be treated as a potential cloaking signal until proven otherwise.