# Content equivalence (no cloaking)

> Serving equivalent facts in different formats at one URL is legitimate content negotiation, but serving materially different content by user-agent is cloaking, a spam violation that reduces ranking eligibility.

<!-- Canonical: https://agentmint.net/signals/content-equivalence-no-cloaking/ · Signal in the AgentMint.net Signals Database · Evidence: spec-fact (Very high confidence) · Last verified 2026-07-08 · Evidence types are load-bearing: spec-fact | reported | hypothesis (no measured). -->

- **Affects (funnel stage):** Discovery
- **Evidence:** spec-fact
- **Confidence:** Very high
- **Impact:** 3/3
- **Status:** active
- **Last verified:** 2026-07-08

## Per-platform status

Undocumented platforms show "unknown" - honest unknowns, never invented.

| Platform | Status | Notes | Source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ChatGPT | unknown | Not documented by this platform. | - |
| Gemini / Google AI Mode | unknown | Not documented by this platform. | - |
| Perplexity | unknown | Not documented by this platform. | - |
| Copilot | reported | Bing's current Webmaster Guidelines list cloaking among practices that reduce ranking eligibility and grounding visibility across Bing and Copilot experiences. | [link](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a) (verified 2026-07-08) |
| Claude | unknown | Not documented by this platform. | - |

## Evidence and sources

- [Google, Spam policies for Google web search](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies)
- [MDN, HTTP content negotiation](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Content_negotiation)
- [Bing, Webmaster Guidelines](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a)
- [Bing Webmaster Blog](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/october-2018/bingbot-Series-JavaScript,-Dynamic-Rendering,-and-Cloaking-Oh-My) (2018-10-31)

## How to act on this

Keep the facts identical across HTML, Markdown, .md mirror, and feed; never vary the content itself by user-agent (throttling a request is access control, not cloaking).

### Related checklist items
- [Treat price competitiveness as a monitoring habit, and never cloak prices to agents vs. users.](https://agentmint.net/tools/agent-selection-checklist/#b-price-position-02) (Selection)
- [Test query-conditional description rewrites where they plausibly help, expecting concentrated, not universal, gains.](https://agentmint.net/tools/agent-selection-checklist/#b-product-content-05) (Selection)

### Handbook chapters
- [Information Density: Facts Per Token on Machine Surfaces](https://agentmint.net/handbook/information-density/)
- [Serving Agent Traffic Without Breaking Your Origin](https://agentmint.net/handbook/serving-agent-traffic/)

### Related signals
- [Machine-readable page representation](https://agentmint.net/signals/machine-readable-mirror/)
- [Competitive price awareness with parity](https://agentmint.net/signals/price-competitive-awareness/)
- [Origin serve-ability for agents](https://agentmint.net/signals/origin-serveability/)