Examples of cloaking
- Serving a keyword-rich page to Googlebot but a different page, such as a sales or spam page, to visitors
- Showing text or links only when the user agent or IP address belongs to a search engine
- Sneaky redirects that send visitors, but not crawlers, somewhere else
- Hacked sites where attackers show spam only to search engines, so the owner doesn’t notice
What isn’t cloaking
Adapting content for users is fine, as long as search engines see what users in the same situation see:
- Different layouts for mobile and desktop
- Content in the visitor’s language, or with local prices
- Paywalls and gated content marked up with Google’s paywalled content structured data
- Prerendering that gives crawlers the same content as users
How to check your site
Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to see a page as Googlebot sees it, and compare it with what visitors get. If you find content you didn’t add, check the Security issues report and look for signs of hacking.