In the early days of the web, “cloaking” was a dirty word. It conjured images of black-hat SEOs serving keyword-stuffed gibberish to search engine spiders while presenting a pristine, albeit often irrelevant, page to human users. It was a deception, a slight of hand designed to game the system. Today, as we stand on the precipice of the Agentic Web, the concept of cloaking is being reimagined, rehabilitated, and repurposed. We are moving away from deception and towards Agent Experience Optimization (AXO).

In our previous analysis, Effect of Nofollow on LLM Training, we established a grim reality for the privacy-conscious webmaster: AI training bots do not respect the rel="nofollow" attribute.

For two decades, nofollow was the gentlemen’s agreement of the web. It was a digital “Do Not Enter” sign that search engines like Google and Bing respected to manage authority flow (PageRank) and combat spam. It was a protocol built for an era of retrieval, where the primary value of a link was the endorsement it carried. If you didn’t want to endorse a site, you added the tag, and the “juice” stopped flowing.