<b>An A/B testing tool accidentally cloaked the entire site</b>
A retailer's organic traffic dropped 34% with no algorithm update, no migration, no content change. Manual actions: none. It made no sense — until we tested the page as Googlebot.
The live render for the crawler was a blank white page with a spinner. The A/B testing platform, loaded synchronously in the <code><head></code>, hid the body with <code>opacity: 0</code> until it decided which variant to show — an anti-flicker trick. The tool's variant-assignment call to its server took up to 9 seconds. Googlebot rendered, saw a hidden body past its patience window, and indexed a blank page across thousands of URLs.
Worse, the content humans saw and the content Google saw genuinely differed — the textbook definition of cloaking, triggered entirely by accident.
We excluded the Googlebot user agent from the test and capped the anti-flicker hide at 1 second.
—Organic 34% drop → recovered to +6% in 10 weeks
—Rendered pages with visible content: 0% → 100%
An anti-flicker snippet, unsupervised, is a cloaking machine.
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<b>An A/B testing tool accidentally cloaked the entire site</b>
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