Server-side rendering (SSR)
Server-side rendering means the server sends a complete HTML page, rather than sending a near-empty page that JavaScript fills in once it loads in the browser.
It decides whether anything reading your page without running JavaScript can see your content at all.
Google's crawler does run JavaScript, though it queues that work and doesn't always come back promptly.
Most AI answer engines are considerably less patient, so a page that only assembles in the browser can be invisible to them.
HubSpot found AI models were quoting the wrong prices for their products because the crawlers couldn't read their JavaScript-rendered pricing pages.
You can test it in a minute: view the page source and search for a sentence you can see on screen, and if it isn't in the source, a machine reading the page may not find it either.
Every page I build renders on the server for this reason.
What this means for you
This is the difference between being readable and being quotable. Publishing more content on a site that doesn't render on the server puts the new pages in the same blind spot as the old ones.
This one sits under Web design.
Related terms
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