How can you check your own site in 30 seconds?
Run one command in a terminal. It fetches your homepage exactly the way a crawler does, with no browser and no JavaScript, and shows you what comes back.
curl -sL https://yourdomain.com/ | head -60
If you see your headline, your services and your copy, you are fine. If you see something like <div id="root"></div> and nothing else, every AI crawler sees that too.
Why do AI crawlers not just render the page?
Rendering JavaScript is expensive. A traditional crawler fetches a file; a rendering crawler has to run a full browser, wait for network requests to settle, and execute untrusted code — at a scale of billions of pages. Google invested years into doing it anyway. The AI crawlers, which are much newer and operating at enormous volume, largely have not.
Does this affect Google too?
Less, but not zero. Google does render JavaScript, so a client-side site can rank. But rendering happens in a second pass that can lag the initial crawl, and anything that fails during rendering simply does not get indexed. Server-rendered HTML removes an entire category of failure rather than betting on the renderer.
What does fixing it involve?
You do not have to abandon your framework or rewrite the site. The goal is simply that the server sends finished HTML. There are three common routes, in rough order of effort.
- Prerendering — render each page to static HTML at build time; the app still hydrates and behaves identically
- Server-side rendering — render per request, for content that changes constantly or depends on who is logged in
- Full framework migration — the largest change, and usually unnecessary for a marketing site
Which content most often goes missing?
Beyond the obvious case of a fully client-rendered site, two patterns quietly lose content even on sites that are otherwise fine.
- FAQ accordions that mount the answer only when opened — the questions ship, the answers do not
- Tabs and carousels that render only the active panel
- Anything loaded by an API call after the page boots
- "Load more" content that never appears without a click
What should you do after fixing the rendering?
Make the content easy to quote. Answer the question directly in the opening paragraph rather than building up to it, use headings that match how people actually phrase questions, and add structured data so engines can identify your organisation with confidence. Rendering gets you readable; structure gets you cited.