Bot Detection
Tester

Bot detection refers to techniques websites use to identify and respond differently to search engine crawlers vs human visitors. While this can be used for dynamic rendering (which Google supports), improper implementation can lead to cloaking — showing different content to bots, which violates Google's guidelines and can result in penalties.

Cloaking means serving substantially different content to search engine bots than to users. Google penalizes cloaking because it deceives users. To avoid it, ensure bots and users see the same core content. Dynamic rendering (serving pre-rendered HTML to bots) is acceptable as long as the content matches what users see.

The tool compares the raw HTML your server sends (what a basic crawler sees) with the fully rendered HTML (what a browser sees after JavaScript executes). Differences in content between these versions can indicate user-agent-based content serving.

First, determine if the content difference is intentional or accidental. If you're using dynamic rendering, some differences are expected (like pre-rendered HTML vs CSR shell). The key is that the final visible content should be the same. If you're serving completely different content to bots, that needs to be fixed immediately.