Source: Search Engine Journal
As AI search engines crawl hidden or obscured content that brands deliberately exclude from public view, they're recreating the exact dynamics that made SEO cloaking a persistent fraud vector—except the deception is now built into the infrastructure itself. The structural incentive for brands to feed AI systems different information than they show users will intensify as AI search traffic becomes valuable, creating a shadow layer of the web optimized for algorithmic consumption rather than human transparency. This outcome is already emerging from treating AI indexing as a separate, less-regulated tier of information access.