What is cloaking in advertising?
Cloaking is showing one version of an advert or landing page to a platform's reviewers and a different version to ordinary visitors. It is used to get prohibited or misleading content past ad review. Every major ad platform and search engine bans it. In search arbitrage it leads to ad account bans, feed termination and, in some cases, legal action.
Cloaking works by guessing who is looking, using IP ranges, device details and behaviour, and serving a harmless page to suspected reviewers. Real visitors get the aggressive version. Platforms treat it as among the most serious breaches because it defeats ad review entirely; Meta has taken cloaking operators to court.
We explain it so readers can recognise it, not use it. Signs that a partner or supplier is cloaking include creatives that could never pass review yet stay live, landing pages that differ when opened from different networks, and vendors selling "filters" to hide pages from moderators. For a feed, Google's referrerAdCreative requirement makes the gap between advert and page far harder to conceal.