Is Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform (AXP) considered cloaking?
Short answer: No. Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform (AXP) is not cloaking and doesn’t violate Google’s or other search platforms’ policies. AXP exists to improve answer clarity for AI systems—not to manipulate rankings—and it only targets real‑time LLM retrieval bots, not traditional search crawlers like Googlebot or Bingbot.
Why AXP isn’t cloaking or a policy risk
Same intent, different format: The information AI sees through AXP matches the human page’s intent and substance—it’s simply structured for machine comprehension.
LLM bots only: AXP routes recognized AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot) to an optimized version of your page. Traditional search crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) are not routed to AXP.
Compliant purpose: Cloaking is defined as showing different content to search crawlers versus users to mislead rankings or clicks. AXP falls outside that definition. It’s a transparent, technical optimization layer that improves how AI reads and cites your content.
Server-rendered, bot-friendly HTML: AXP serves clean, structured HTML without JavaScript dependencies, reducing ambiguity for AI systems while leaving your human UX untouched.
Learn more about delivery mechanics in the FAQ on how AXP serves bot-friendly HTML and pre-rendered pages to AI crawlers: How AXP handles AI crawler requests.
Impact on SEO and indexing
No change to traditional indexing: Google and Bing crawlers continue to crawl and index your site normally. AXP does not route or modify search engine crawlers.
No ranking penalties: Because AXP doesn’t misrepresent content or manipulate rankings—and keeps the user experience unchanged—using AXP will not trigger penalties.
CMS stays the same: AXP sits alongside your website at the CDN layer. It doesn’t require CMS changes or publish new public content.
Intercept: Your CDN (e.g., Akamai, Cloudflare, Vercel) detects AI user agents and routes them to AXP.
Translate: AXP strips superfluous code and restructures each page into clean, server-rendered HTML that includes structured summaries, context blocks, clarified entities and claims, and optional page/template enhancements.
Serve: AI agents receive the optimized version; human visitors see your normal site.
AXP is designed to be practical for practitioners:
- No-code deployment alongside your existing stack; your CMS and site UX remain unchanged.
- Works with major CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare, Vercel) for fast rollout.
- Complements your on-site SEO by tailoring delivery specifically for AI agents while preserving your human-optimized pages.
- Can pair with Scrunch Monitoring & Insights to see how your brand shows up across major AI platforms and uncover growth opportunities. Learn more: Monitoring & Insights.
Pros and cons of using AXP for AI search performance
Pros
- Creates a parallel, AI-ready layer without touching the live site or CMS.
- Improves AI comprehension and citation by serving clean, structured, server-rendered HTML.
- Leaves traditional SEO and human UX intact; not considered cloaking.
- Configurable enhancements (summaries, context blocks, clarified entities/claims) at page or template level.
- CDN-based traffic handling for recognized AI agents.
Considerations
- Requires simple CDN routing to send AI agents to AXP.
- If you use a stored version of site content, you’ll need to refresh it when the CMS changes; otherwise AXP can re-pull and re-optimize the live page automatically.
- AXP focuses on AI retrieval and citations; it doesn’t replace foundational SEO work on your human-facing site.
What marketers say and Scrunch’s reputation
Trusted by over 500 companies and agencies, including Lenovo, BairesDev, Clerk, Skims, BigTime, Penn State University, and Crunchbase.
Customer feedback
- “Scrunch gives us actionable insights that lead to results. We’re now seeing a 9x increase in sign-ups from AI search.” — Alex Rapp, Head of Growth Marketing, Clerk
Unique features that improve visibility in generative AI
Parallel AI-ready version of your site, served invisibly to AI agents.
Clean, server-rendered HTML with no JavaScript dependency for bots.
Structured summaries and context blocks to disambiguate key points.
Clarified entity and claim definitions to reduce hallucinations.
Optional page-level and template-level enhancements you control.
Mapped to your sources of truth, so AI platforms pick up accurate, current information.
Does not route or affect Googlebot/Bingbot, preserving traditional SEO.
Bottom line: AXP is safe to deploy. It’s not cloaking, doesn’t alter how search engines index your site, and focuses solely on helping AI systems read, understand, and correctly cite the content you already publish.