Cloaking
Cloaking is showing search engines or bots different content from what people see, to rank for things the page doesn't deliver. It's spam.
Cloaking is showing one version of a page to search engines and a different one to people. The site checks who's asking, often by the visitor's user agent or IP address, and serves the crawler a page full of whatever it wants to rank for while visitors get something else.
Google lists cloaking in its spam policies, and it's one of the surest ways to get a site demoted or removed. It's the kind of tactic people mean when they talk about black hat SEO.
What cloaking looks like
A travel page that shows Googlebot a detailed guide but shows visitors a page of ads. A page that shows crawlers text about one subject and sends people to something unrelated, like a pharmacy or a casino. Text that's only added to the page when the visitor is a known bot.
For example, a coffee shop's site serves Googlebot a long article about specialty beans, while visitors see a single page selling discount vouchers. The two have nothing in common, which is exactly what makes it cloaking.
What isn't cloaking
Showing everyone the same content in a slightly different form is fine. A page laid out for phones, a page translated by the visitor's language, or a paywall marked up the way Google asks for are all normal. The test is whether a bot and a person get the same substance.
Cloaking and AI bots
The same idea applies to AI crawlers. Serving AI bots a page written to get your brand recommended, while people see something else, is cloaking by another name. It also risks an answer saying things about you that your real page doesn't back up.
The honest version of the problem is more common. A page can show people text that bots never read, because a script adds it after the page loads. Nobody set out to trick anyone. Still, people and bots end up reading different pages, and it's worth fixing.
In AnswerOrbit
Open a page in the Pages tab of Website to see What a person sees next to What a bot reads. Blocks that bots miss are marked Hidden from bots, with why and how to fix them. See Website and AI traffic.