This already has a name in SEO circles: "cloaking" - serving different content to crawlers than to humans. Google has penalized sites for this for years.

The ironic twist is that sites might actually want to serve curated content to AI crawlers - not to deceive, but to control their representation in AI systems. The incentive structure is already there.

The precedent with Google AMP cached content showed what happens: publishers optimized specifically for what the crawler saw, diverging from the actual user experience. The "real" web became secondary.

The real danger isn't fraud - it's gradual optimization pressure. If AI agents increasingly act on crawled data, site operators have every incentive to polish what the crawler sees. You end up with an AI-facing web that diverges from what humans actually experience.