Compliance & regulatory

Cloaking

Showing different content to ad reviewers vs. real users.

Cloaking is the practice of serving one page (usually a clean, compliant page) to ad-network reviewers and bots while serving a different page (the actual offer) to real users. It's against Google/Meta/Taboola's policies in 100% of cases. Operators do it anyway in grey verticals (sweeps, dating, crypto). Detection has gotten dramatically better since 2020 — heuristic + ML detection at most major networks. We don't recommend it.

Example

Reviewer hits the page from a known datacenter IP → sees a Wikipedia-style article on green tea. Real user from a residential IP on mobile → sees the actual nutra advertorial. Ban-on-detection.

Related terms

Compliance
Adherence to ad-network policies, FTC rules, and platform ToS.
IVT (Invalid Traffic)
Bot, click-farm, or otherwise non-human ad traffic.
FTC (Federal Trade Commission)
The US consumer-protection regulator that enforces affiliate-disclosure law.
Fingerprinting
Identifying users via browser/device signals when cookies are blocked.