cloaking

Serving materially different content to a crawler than to a browser. A server refusing a datacentre address while serving a residential one is not cloaking - it is IP-based access control, and calling it cloaking is a false accusation.

Crawlers and access

Who is fetching, whether they are who they claim, and what your rules actually permit.

retrieval crawler · user-triggered fetch · verified crawler · forged crawler identity · unverifiable · robots.txt · user-agent group · AI opt-out · Content-Signal · crawl budget · challenge page at 200 · uniform refusal · nonexistent-path control · blocked render resource · off-host redirect · homepage refused · FCrDNS · Crawler trap · Conditional request · ASN blocking · operator feed · residential proxy · Google-Extended · Google-Agent · GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot · ClaudeBot vs Claude-User · PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User · CCBot · Bytespider · agentic traffic · crawler classification

← crawl budget · challenge page at 200 →

See it in the full glossary · 579 terms across 19 areas. Scan a site to see which of these apply to it.