Fraud & invalid traffic
Cloaking
Cloaking is showing one version of an ad or page to a platform's reviewers and a different version to real users, in order to hide rule-breaking content.
Every traffic source checks ads and landing pages before they run (ad review). Cloaking is the trick of detecting who is looking: the reviewer or crawler is shown a clean, compliant page, while ordinary visitors are sent to something the platform would have rejected.
In search arbitrage it has been used to hide aggressive landers or misleading claims from Meta, TikTok or Google reviewers, and sometimes to hide the true lander from the feed owner. It is deception by design, so it is not a grey area. Google Ads treats circumventing its systems as an egregious violation that leads to account suspension, and other platforms act similarly with an account ban.
Signs that cloaking is in play include a destination that changes depending on location, device or referrer, complaints from users about content the platform never saw, and creatives that do not match the page. The referrerAdCreative requirement was introduced partly so the feed owner sees what the user was promised.
For honest operators the lesson is practical: do not buy from, or partner with, anyone who uses a "cloaker". Their bans and feed losses spread to everyone connected to them.
Think of it like this
It is a restaurant with a spotless kitchen it shows the health inspector and a second, dirty kitchen where the food is actually cooked.
Related terms
Ad review (ad approval)
Ad review is the check an advertising platform runs on each ad and its landing page before, and sometimes after, allowing it to be shown.
Account ban
An account ban is an ad platform's decision to disable an advertiser's account, stopping all its ads, usually for breaking or appearing to break advertising policies.
Misleading ad
A misleading ad promises or implies something the landing page does not deliver, tricking people into a click they would not otherwise have made.
referrerAdCreative
referrerAdCreative is a Google AdSense for Search parameter in which a publisher must send the exact wording of the ad that brought a visitor to a related search page.
Policy violation
A policy violation is any breach of the rules set by a search feed or traffic source, from a misleading creative to non-compliant traffic or a wrongly declared parameter.
Redirect
A redirect automatically forwards a browser from one web address to another, often passing through a tracking link that records the click along the way.
Sources: Google Advertising Policies: Abusing the ad network, Google AdSense Help: Related search for your content pages