Google's John Mueller warned that ‘are you a bot' interstitials served to Googlebot can knock a site's actual pages out of the search index. Bot-protection software flags the crawler as suspicious, the challenge screen goes back with a normal response code, and Google indexes that screen rather than the content behind it. Because the same interstitial shows up across countless sites, Google treats the near-identical pages as duplicates and picks one as canonical, which can leave another site's URL as the authoritative version of your page. Mueller said the problem is hard to trace since regular visitors rarely trigger the check and the site looks fine when the owner loads it. Search Console's page indexing report and URL Inspection tool are where the issue actually surfaces.
