Cloaking is a trick in which the ad platform’s reviewers see an innocent page while real visitors are sent somewhere else. It is how bad actors sneak banned or misleading offers past moderation. Platforms treat it as one of the most serious violations there is, and reputable networks do too.
Cloaking means showing different content to different visitors, based on who they appear to be, in order to deceive a reviewer. In search, Google’s spam policies define it as presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate rankings and mislead users. In paid advertising it means showing ad reviewers and automated scanners a compliant page while real users land on one that would not pass review, typically by filtering on IP ranges, user agents, referrers, device data or behaviour that looks like a reviewer’s.
Platforms treat cloaking as fraud rather than an ordinary policy breach. Google Ads lists it under its Circumventing systems policy, where violations can lead to account suspension upon detection and without prior warning, and suspended advertisers are generally not allowed to open new accounts. Meta has gone to court against providers of cloaking software, starting in 2020 with the developer of LeadCloak, and disables the ad and personal accounts it links to such tools.
Cloaking is not the same as legitimate personalisation. Showing a page in the visitor’s language, sending each country to the offer available there, or filtering obvious bots out of your statistics does not aim to deceive anyone. The test is intent and consistency: a reviewer and an ordinary user from the same place, on the same kind of device, should see the same page.
For affiliates the risk is practical as well as legal. Cloaked campaigns are typically used for offers with false claims, fake celebrity endorsements or prohibited products; they end in banned ad accounts, held payments, network termination and, where consumers are deceived, regulatory exposure for everyone in the chain. Reputable networks prohibit cloaked traffic in their terms. Compliant creatives and landers that pass review on their own merits are the only way to build a campaign that can still be running next year.
In April 2020 Facebook, now Meta, sued Basant Gajjar, the developer behind LeadCloak, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. According to Facebook, the software was sold to advertisers to get around its automated ad review, and was also aimed at other companies’ review systems, including Google’s.
| Who looked | What they saw |
|---|---|
| Ad reviewers and scanners | an ordinary page, such as a small shop |
| Real users | pages pushing scams linked to COVID-19, cryptocurrency, pharmaceuticals, diet pills and fake news, some with celebrity images |
Facebook disabled personal and ad accounts it found using the software and said the lawsuit was meant to identify more of its customers. The lesson for affiliates is that cloaking does not only put one account at risk: platforms pursue the tool vendors and, through them, the advertisers and affiliates who used the tools.
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Showing ad reviewers or search engines a compliant page while real users are sent to different content, in order to get a campaign past moderation.
It breaks the policies of every major ad platform and usually accompanies deceptive offers that consumer protection law forbids. Platforms have taken cloaking vendors to court.
Under the Circumventing systems policy the account can be suspended upon detection without prior warning, and related accounts may be suspended as well.
No, as long as reviewers and users from the same country and device see the same content. It becomes cloaking when the aim is to hide the real page from reviewers.
References are listed as plain text on purpose; look them up by title and publisher. Updated: 2026-10-09.
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