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Here is Google's official recommendations for website testing. According to them, no amount of cloaking is okay. Try using one of the other methods suggested.

Logan, I found your replies very helpful.  We have allowed a site to replicate some of our pages / content on their site and have the rel canonical tag in place pointing back to us. However,  Google has indexed the pages on the partner's site as well. Is this common or has something gone wrong? the partner temporarily had an original source tag pointing to their page as well as the canonical pointing to us. We caught this issue a few weeks ago and had  the original source tag removed. GSC sees the rel canonical tag for our site. But I am concerned our site could be getting hurt for dupe content issues and the partner site may out rank us as their site is much stronger. Any insight would be greatly appreciated

Escaped fragments are not recommended by Google anymore. Google now recommends Progressive Enhancement such as the History API pushState. See this article for details: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html Here's another post that you may want to check out: https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/ -Dan

Yes, it's responsive design with the exact same URLs for both mobile and desktop. Thanks for your helpful response!

Here is the Google’s guidelines for developers that how they can make their AJAX code crawlable.... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en I guess you should pretty much focus on your user’s experience and I believe Google crawlers can easy crawls your AJAX and JS codes... Hope this helps!

I think you can remove the sitemap since it returns so many warnings. I don't think sitemaps have so much seo benefits but rather helps google find pages that are hard to find in your site or no accessible through regular href. So make sure your site has a good structure and that all page can be found by browsing your site (click on links from pages to pages) and you will be fine sitemap or not. Use linksleuth to crawl your site, if you are not sure of the accessibility of all pages.

Paul, Thanks for your reply! I have used the paid version of Screaming Frog with regex to exclude pages with certain parameters, but I have not tried the custom queries. Could you give me an example of a custom query that would find empty canonical tags? That would be extremely helpful.