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In general, Google cares only about cloaking in the sense of treating their crawler differently to human visitors - it's not a problem to treat them differently to other crawlers. So: if you are tracking the "2 pages visited" using cookies (which I assume you must be? there is no other reliable way to know the 2nd request is from the same user without cookies?) then you can treat googlebot exactly the same as human users - every request is stateless (without cookies) and so googlebot will be able to crawl. You can then treat non-googlebot scrapers more strictly, and rate limit / throttle / deny them as you wish. I think that if real human users get at least one "free" visit, then you are probably OK - but you may want to consider not showing the recaptcha to real human users coming from google (but you could find yourself in an arms race with the scrapers pretending to be human visitors from google). In general, I would expect that if it's a recaptcha ("prove you are human") step rather than a paywall / registration wall, you will likely be OK in the situation where: Googlebot is never shown the recaptcha Other scrapers are aggressively blocked Human visitors get at least one page without a recaptcha wall Human visitors can visit more pages after completing a recaptcha (but without paying / registering) Hope that all helps. Good luck!