cloaking

What cloaking does not show

Where cloaking comes up on this site

• Why word count cannot spot a parked domain: 783 wordsThere was no cloaking to detect and no difference to exploit: it is the same page for everyone, and every crawler that reads it gets 783 words about nothing.

Definitions that name cloaking

Header parity

Related terms in Crawlers and access

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

visitor resolve · published crawler ranges · operator origin · signed agent · agent arrival · agent conduct record · agent traffic index · user-triggered fetch exemption · 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 · user agent · datacenter IP · vantage point · rate limit · delivery comparison · honeypot

Questions about cloaking

What is cloaking?

Serving materially different content to a crawler than to a browser.

What does cloaking not show or guarantee?

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.

Which area of the glossary does cloaking belong to?

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

← crawl budget  ·  challenge page at 200 →

See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.