JavaScript SEO

JavaScript SEO is the set of practices that keep a JavaScript-driven site visible to search and AI engines. The core problem is that content generated by JavaScript may not be present in the initial HTML response, so whether an engine sees it depends on whether and how that engine renders.

For Google, the answer is "eventually, with caveats": Googlebot crawls the HTML, queues the page for rendering, and indexes the rendered content on a second pass, which can delay indexing and occasionally miss content if rendering fails. For the AI crawlers, the answer is simpler and harsher: they do not render JavaScript, so anything not in the raw HTML is invisible to them.

The playbook is to server-render or statically render primary content, use real links (anchor tags with href, not click handlers) so crawlers can follow them, avoid hiding content behind interactions that require JavaScript, and verify with a non-JS fetch. The cheapest test is curl piped to grep: if the content you want cited is not in the curl output, it is not in the engines either. This single discipline is the difference between a site that is fine on Google and one that is also present across the AI surfaces.