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.

Vercel reported in December 2024 that OpenAI's and Perplexity's crawlers, among other major AI crawlers, don't render JavaScript, so a page that only assembles in the browser can be invisible to them.

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

Server rendering means every system that visits can read the page, which is what makes new content quotable.

This one sits under Web design.

Related terms

Answer engine citation

An answer engine citation is ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot quoting your site as a source in an answer.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are 3 Google measurements of how a page feels to use: how fast the main content appears, how quickly it responds, and how much it jumps around while loading.

Noindex

Noindex is an instruction in a page's code telling search engines to leave that page out of their results.

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