Integrity, control 3 of 7
G-03 No cloaking or deceptive redirects
Do not serve materially different claims or destinations to search engines or agents for manipulation. Legitimate localisation and rendering adaptations must retain equivalent facts and user purpose.
- Priority
- Gate. A FAIL stops publish or launch.
- Hard gate
- Yes. A FAIL stops publication, whatever the score.
- Change class
- APPROVAL_REQUIRED: Required exact authority must be valid before the consequential action.
- Quality bucket
- Not scored: hard gate only
Why it matters
If a crawler sees one page and a visitor lands on another, users are misled and search results stop reflecting reality. Google's spam policies treat cloaking and sneaky redirects as manipulation. Hacked redirects can create the same problem without the site owner knowing.
Evidence to review
- HTTP chains, rendered content comparisons, application rules and deployment history.
How to implement
- Compare responses across normal browsers and permitted crawler tests.
- Inspect redirects, middleware, edge rules and compromised scripts.
- Document legitimate geographic, account or device differences; do not equate every response variation with cloaking.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Needs your evidence. No automated check covers this control, so it stays UNKNOWN until evidence is supplied.
Evidence needed: a comparison of what users and crawlers receive, and the business reason for any user-agent or geo-based differences in content or redirects.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
- [G4] Google spam policies
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.