Websites. Reviewed October 29, 2026
Server-side rendering
Also called: SSR, Static rendering, Pre-rendering
Server-side rendering means the server sends a finished HTML page instead of a blank shell that JavaScript fills in later, so search engines and AI crawlers see the content on the first request.
In practice
Many modern sites built on app frameworks ship the shell and build the page in the browser. People see it fine. Crawlers that do not run JavaScript, which includes most AI crawlers, see an empty page.
The test is simple: view the page source and look for the words on the page. If they are not there, the crawlers are not reading them.
Related terms
- AI crawlerAn AI crawler is a bot such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot that reads web pages so an AI assistant can learn from them or quote them, and a site allows or blocks each one in its robots.txt file.
- IndexingIndexing is Google adding a page to its database so it can appear in search results, and a page that has been crawled but not indexed cannot rank for anything.
- Core Web VitalsCore Web Vitals are Google's three page-experience measurements taken from real Chrome users: Largest Contentful Paint for load speed, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability.
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