This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung
Indexing
What is cloaking, and how is it detected?
Cloaking means a website delivers a different page to the search engine than to human visitors — search engines regard that as a policy violation. The "Indexing" audit area therefore requests your page twice: once with the Googlebot identifier, once with a normal browser's. It then compares both responses. The principle is simple: bots and people have to get the same page.
Bots and people get the same page
Every request to a website carries an identifier that reveals who's asking — a Chrome browser on Windows, or the Googlebot, say. A server can respond to that differently. That's exactly what cloaking exploits: the search engine is shown a version dressed up for ranking, visitors get a different one. Search engines regard that as deceptive, since their search result then promises something the visitor doesn't get. The check's principle is therefore simple: both requests must essentially return the same page — same size, same title, same content.
How the comparison works
The check requests the final document twice — once as the Googlebot, once as a regular browser — and compares two things: the amount of HTML delivered and the page title. If the sizes differ by more than 15 percent, the delivery counts as suspicious, and the 5 points for this rule are forfeited. The finding states the measured deviation as a percentage, so your technical team can specifically check what content is only delivered to one of the two identifiers. A different page title is also recorded in the report.
Cloaking can also happen by accident
Not every difference in treatment is malicious intent. Protection systems against automated access, maintenance pages, or personalisation can cause a bot to get considerably less content than a person does — or a challenge page instead of the real one. For search engines' assessment, intent makes no difference: what's measured is what gets delivered. So after installing firewalls, bot protection, or country-based redirects, have it checked whether search engines still get the full page. The comparison with both identifiers reliably uncovers side effects like this.
- Ask your agency whether protection or personalisation systems treat search engines differently from visitors.
- Have it tested after installing a firewall or bot protection whether the Googlebot still gets the full page.
- Steer clear of offers that promise to show extra content "just for Google".
- Compare your page's title in the browser with the title in the Google result — a big difference is a warning sign.
