Pre-lander

A pre-lander sits one step before the page that makes money. The visitor clicks an ad, reads a short article, quiz or story on the pre-lander, and then clicks through to the page with the offer or the search ads.

The idea comes from affiliate marketing, where a pre-lander "pre-sells" the product. In search arbitrage it has been used to add context a traffic platform wants to see, to let uninterested visitors leave before they reach the feed, or to separate the ad platform's review from the monetised page.

That last use is the risky one. Showing a reviewer one page while real visitors are sent somewhere different is cloaking, which every major platform prohibits. On the feed side, Google's related search rules say the visitor must not have to navigate extensively to find what the ad promised, and extra hops make it harder to show that the ad and the monetised page match.

A pre-lander that genuinely informs is legitimate. One that exists to obscure where the visitor is going is not. Each added page also loses visitors and should justify itself in the numbers.

Think of it like this

A pre-lander is like the person outside a restaurant showing you the menu. Helpful if the menu is real; a problem if the food inside is something else.