Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Google not check for this at all? They could easily spoof their User-Agent to see if sites lie about what they show.
I dunno, folks might get salty if google's bots used misleading useragents. And it just escalates the existing cat&mouse game
> Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
You’d think they’d do something about it. Maybe it’s because Reddit doesn’t cloak necessarily, but when it straight up refuses to show without the app (sometimes), I’d call that cloaking (in spirit). News sites throwing up paywalls would fit that too.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...