What does the user-agent consistency check look for?
It compares what your site serves to different user-agents to confirm bots and users see the same thing. Specifically:
- Content parity — whether the main content served to crawler user-agents matches what a regular browser receives.
- Stripped or altered content — whether bots get a reduced, blocked or different version of the page.
- Cloaking signals — deliberate or accidental serving of different content based on the user-agent.
Consistent content across user-agents passes; minor differences are a warning; substantially different or stripped content for bots is a fail.
How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?
GEObubbly requests the page as different user-agents and compares the content returned. It's an extended Infrastructure check that runs server-side, since it compares responses across user-agents.
Criteria: Pass — same content to all agents. Warning — minor differences. Fail — bots blocked or served different content.
Why content consistency across user-agents matters for GEO
Engines should see the same content your users see. When a site serves different content based on the user-agent, problems follow. The deliberate version is cloaking — showing crawlers one thing and users another — which is a serious guidelines violation. But the more common version is accidental: bot-detection systems, edge rules or rendering setups that, often unintentionally, serve crawlers a stripped-down, blocked or fallback version of the page. Either way, the consequence for GEO is real: if AI crawlers receive reduced or different content, engines either cite something your actual visitors never see, or fail to pick up your real content at all. This compounds the JavaScript-rendering issue — a crawler that gets a JavaScript-stripped fallback effectively sees a different page than the user's browser renders. The fix is to ensure your server-rendered content is consistent regardless of user-agent: don't tailor the actual content to bots, and make sure bot-detection or edge layers aren't quietly degrading what crawlers receive.