<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" > <channel> <title>Prerender</title> <atom:link href="https://prerender.io/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>https://prerender.io</link> <description>Prerender. JavaScript SEO, solved with Dynamic Rendering</description> <lastBuildDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:19:09 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency> <generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4</generator> <image> <url>https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/favicon-150x150.png</url> <title>Prerender</title> <link>https://prerender.io</link> <width>32</width> <height>32</height> </image> <item> <title>What HubSpot’s AI Search Strategist Knows That Most Marketers Don’t</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/what-hubspots-ai-search-strategist-knows-that-most-marketers-dont/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:19:07 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[AI SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Podcast]]></category> <category><![CDATA[agentic AI]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ai podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[tech podcasts]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=10120</guid> <description><![CDATA[Sylvain Charbit, AI Search Strategist at HubSpot, joins the Get Discovered podcast.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>HubSpot is one of the most recognizable brands in SaaS. It powers nearly 300,000 businesses across 135 countries, its blog is one of the most visited marketing destinations on the internet, and it’s one of the most consistently cited B2B brands in AI search.</p> <p>In this Get Discovered podcast conversation, Sylvain Charbit, HubSpot’s Lead AI Search Technical Strategist and a Prerender.io client, pulls back the curtain on how HubSpot is navigating the shift from traditional SEO to AI search. </p> <p>With actionable tips for brands of all sizes—not just enterprise giants like HubSpot—he shares what his team is testing, what’s working, what failed, and where most marketers are still going wrong with AI.</p> <p>Watch the full conversation below, or read on for key takeaways.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="What HubSpot's AI Search Strategist Knows That Most Marketers Don't" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nGKOPZbRILA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Gap Is Widening Between Traditional SEO and AEO </h2> <p>Most conversations during our podcast this season have been centered on a key theme: AEO (or GEO or AIO, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/seo-vs-aio-vs-geo/">whichever search term you prefer</a>) is essentially the same as traditional SEO. And especially the technical foundations. While Sylvain thinks this still rings true, he has a unique take on this. In his opinion: yes, it is. But that’s not the full story. </p> <p>For example, when asked about HubSpot’s success in AI search and whether its strong traditional SEO was central to that, this is his response:</p> <p><em>“I would say that would be a lie to say that our past traditional SEO successes didn’t play a key role in our AI search visibility today. Yes, we are definitely benefiting from that. But this is not the </em><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><em><strong>only </strong>thing</em></span><em>.”</em></p> <p>HubSpot capitalized on that foundation, but they pushed past it. They ran experiments, moved fast, and tried new things specifically for AI discovery. The strong traditional SEO foundation made those efforts more efficient, but it’s not the only reason why they continue to perform well. It’s because they’re constantly evolving with where AI is going, and they know that traditional SEO and AEO have unique differences.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">SEO and AEO Aren’t the Same Anymore</h2> <p>While the SEO fundamentals haven’t changed, it’s more complicated than that. Unlike with the previous days of traditional SEO, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-get-indexed-on-ai-platforms/">AI search strategies</a> like thin content, AI-generated filler content, and topic clusters won’t work. All of these approaches now cost more than they return. Instead, build genuine authority and focus on pages that actually answer your customers’ specific questions, with data, and reflect a real point of view.</p> <p>And here’s where Charbit pushes back on the popular narrative that SEO and AI search optimization are the same. <strong>He overtly disagrees. </strong></p> <p>His take is, honestly, refreshing. Anyone who works in search knows that AEO has a unique set of challenges that differentiate it from traditional SEO. While three years ago, he says, SEO and AEO were about 95% overlapping. Today, he estimates that overlap is closer to 80-85%. But in twelve months, it’ll narrow even further. </p> <p><em>“The gap between traditional SEO and AI will keep on widening. I know Google said this is the same thing. I don’t believe it is, even if it’s very close. But in twelve months, you will see that widening.”</em></p> <p>Who knows how this will play out in the next 3-5 years with <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/">agentic search</a>, but it seems to accurately capture the state of search as it is now. And much better than what the SEO evangelists—or even the GEO evangelists—are repeating on LinkedIn these days, something that anyone working in search can resonate with.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">AI Search Is Not a Traffic Channel (Yet)</h2> <p>Segueing into the next part of the conversation, we explored myths and misconceptions about AI visibility. The clearest misconception that Sylvain hears from marketing leaders is the assumption that AI search should behave like a traffic acquisition channel, measurable through clicks and UTMs. It mostly doesn’t, and at least not yet.</p> <p><em>“AI search is mostly about awareness and influence in general. The user will appear in AI results and then go somewhere else: go to your website, or to a place where you can buy your product or consume your information. This is not something that’s easy to explain or even to understand.”</em></p> <p>For now, the mental model needs to shift. When someone asks ChatGPT which CRM to consider, and your brand gets mentioned alongside two competitors, that doesn’t count as a click. It’s a mention—<a href="https://www.similarweb.com/blog/marketing/geo/ai-mentions-vs-ai-citations/">something entirely different than a citation</a>—and it influences the buyer’s consideration set before they ever visit any website.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/ai-indexing-benchmark-for-ecommerce/">Measuring success in AI search</a> requires a different set of metrics, such as direct traffic, referral traffic, citation rate tracking, prompt monitoring, share of voice across AI platforms, and more. Not just sessions and conversions. For now, the companies optimizing for clicks from AI search are measuring the wrong thing. </p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">SEO Mistakes That Can Actually Hurt You in AI Search</h2> <p>Sylvain spent time on something that isn’t often discussed: the SEO strategies that negatively impact your AI visibility, even if your site is well-optimized otherwise.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">The Cloudflare Problem</h3> <p>Many marketers assume that if they’re visible in Google, they’re visible to AI search tools. But this isn’t quite true. Cloudflare’s default settings, and similar CDN configurations, can actually <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/">block AI bots</a> from crawling your site entirely, without you ever knowing. You have to turn that off manually. There’s also a <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-and-seo/">robots.txt</a> setting within Cloudflare’s interface that, if left at default, can block your site from appearing in multiple LLMs at once.</p> <p><em>“Cloudflare is a very good example. You just set it up, and you’re like, ‘Okay, well, I’m visible in Google, but ChatGPT doesn’t know me at all.’ It’s just because you have to turn off that button that is being activated by default.”</em></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Too Many Schema Tags</h3> <p>Last year, a widely circulated recommendation suggested that schema tags should be packed with as many attributes as possible to give AI systems more granular context. But Sylvain’s team tested this extensively. His team’s findings? Zero impact. </p> <p><em>“As many schema attributes as possible didn’t work at all. It didn’t move the needle at all, and it hurts in the sense that this is wasted resources.”</em></p> <p>Adding <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/structured-data-for-seo/">clean and well-structured schema</a>, even if it’s just two or three attributes, will have more impact than the over-engineered version. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Broad Topic Clusters</h3> <p>Topic clusters were a renowned content strategy a few years ago, and HubSpot was one of the brands leading the charge in this domain. They pioneered wide, low-intent content created to capture broad search volume on every topic (for example, an automotive repair shop writing blogs about what sports cars are). But now, that’s not working anymore. And in fact, it’s being penalized, both by Google and AI systems. </p> <p>Instead, it’s best to have detailed product pages filled with unique insights, experience, and expertise—a development of the EEAT model. Otherwise, you’ll see low traffic, poor conversions, and content efforts that cost significantly more than they return.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Why topic clusters are a failing content strategy for AI search" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X3UTMLWk_Pk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tips for Brands to Show Up in AI Search, According to HubSpot</h2> <p>Most of this conversation happened in the context of HubSpot, a brand with enormous authority built over more than a decade. So the natural question: what do you do if you don’t have that?</p> <p>Sylvain has a few suggestions for brands of all sizes:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Start with fewer pages, not more. </strong>Make every one of them genuinely useful with authored content, real perspectives, and actual data points. </li> </ol> <ol start="2" class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Get crawlable. </strong>Check your robots.txt, fix your Cloudflare settings, minimize JavaScript roadblocks (you can use a solution like <a href="https://prerender.io/">Prerender.io</a> for this), and submit proper sitemaps. Make sure Google knows you exist because right now, Google’s index is still the backbone of how most AI systems find content.</li> </ol> <ol start="3" class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Monitor signals that AI users are finding you. </strong>For example, unusual long-tail queries in Google Search Console that make no sense for a standard search, but perfectly match the conversational prompt someone might type into an AI tool. Build more content around what you find.</li> </ol> <p><em>“When you see something that is working—meaning you’re starting to notice different sorts of traffic coming in, or very long-tail keywords in Google Search Console that would make zero sense in a regular search—maybe that’s something that interests AI users. This is maybe something you should create content for.”</em></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Where Will AI Search Go in the Next 12 Months?</h2> <p>Sylvain shares two developments that he thinks will get the most attention in the next year or so.</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Agentic search. </strong>If Google I/O is any signal (the word “agentic” appeared every two minutes), the next phase of AI search goes beyond answering questions. It’s completing tasks like booking a restaurant, filling out a form, or handling a support ticket. For brands, this means visibility won’t just be about getting cited in answers. It’ll be about being <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-enterprise-site-for-agentic-ai/">accessible enough for an agent</a> to act on your behalf. <br></li> <li><strong>The LLM power shift.</strong> The Q1 2026 State of AI Search report from Datos and SparkToro showed Claude’s user share jumping from around 3.5% to nearly 8.7% in the US, and close to 10% in Europe. ChatGPT’s dominance is eroding while Gemini is growing. This matters for AEO because different AI platforms use different search indices, and multi-platform discovery continues to be important.</li> </ol> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="What is agentic AI? A definition for non-technical people" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4P5krbTab2k?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Takeaways</h2> <p>Ultimately, HubSpot isn’t winning at AI search by following what they did with traditional SEO. And they’re not abandoning their SEO fundamentals, either. This conversation highlights that the secret to success for any new channel is to constantly experiment. Test and refine what’s working, what’s not, and pivot accordingly. </p> <p>It also suggests that we’re going back to first principles. Maintain your authority, be unique, and use original insights—not just AI-generated summaries—to ensure you stay relevant. There’s no shortcut to genuine authority. </p> <p>Lastly, while there’s no shortcut to authority, there are a lot of ways to accidentally block the authority you’ve already built from being seen. Fix the technical barriers first, and build real content second. Measure what you can, acknowledge what you can’t, and keep on experimenting.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tune Into the Full Conversation</h2> <p>Listen to the full episode of the <em>Get Discovered</em> podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes with marketing and SEO leaders navigating the AI discovery challenge in real time.</p> <p>To connect with Sylvain, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvaincharbit/?locale=en">find him on LinkedIn</a>, <a href="https://x.com/scharbitjrs?lang=en">Twitter</a>, his <a href="https://www.sylvaincharbit.com/">website</a>, or check out his work at <a href="http://hubspot.com/">HubSpot</a>. </p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Spotify Embed: What HubSpot Knows About AI Search: Sylvain Charbit, Lead AI Search Strategist at HubSpot" style="border-radius: 12px" width="100%" height="152" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/2R8WsMwJEioZqbWhxE7Uki?si=O020ugXHQRiu7d9O7qhtwQ&utm_source=oembed"></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About Prerender.io</h2> <p>Prerender.io is a leading SEO solution that helps modern websites ensure their JavaScript-heavy pages are fully visible to search engines and AI tools. Trusted by companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Walmart, Prerender.io is the go-to partner for businesses navigating the future of SEO and AI-driven discoverability. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Start for free today or talk to sales for an enterprise solution</a>.</p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-16018d1d wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" style="border-radius:0px;background-color:#1f8511">Try Prerender.io For Free</a></div> </div> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The Difference Between CDNs vs. Prerender.io for Enterprise SEO</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/cdn-vs-prerender-enterprise-seo/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 07:48:19 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=9413</guid> <description><![CDATA[CDNs speed up your site. Prerender.io helps crawlers read it. Learn why enterprise SEO needs both and their roles.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Enterprises running JavaScript-heavy applications routinely invest six figures annually in premium CDN infrastructure. That investment is worthwhile. CDNs solve real problems, but they cannot solve the one that’s killing your organic performance.</p> <p>CDNs deliver content fast, but they cannot execute JavaScript. That single limitation means every search engine bot, AI crawler, and social platform crawler that visits your site sees an empty HTML shell, regardless of how fast your CDN delivers it. The content that should be indexed exists only after JavaScript runs, but most crawlers never get there.</p> <p>Prerender.io exists at a different layer of your infrastructure to fix exactly this. The CDN makes your site fast; Prerender.io makes your site readable to every crawler that matters.</p> <p>This article breaks down why these two layers operate independently, what each one does and where each one stops, and why enterprise SEO strategies require both.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">TL;DR: CDNs vs. Prerender.io for Enterprise SEO</h2> <p>CDNs (like Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS CloudFront) cache and deliver your site’s files faster by routing requests through globally distributed servers. They reduce latency, protect origin servers during traffic spikes, and improve Core Web Vitals scores.</p> <p>CDNs cannot execute JavaScript. Every crawler that visits a JavaScript-rendered page sees an empty HTML shell, regardless of how fast the CDN serves it.</p> <p>Prerender.io fills that gap by using headless Chrome to fully render each page, then serving the resulting HTML snapshot to crawlers. Human visitors still receive the normal JavaScript experience.</p> <p>Without a rendering layer, your site is invisible to:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Google’s rendering queue backlogs.</li> <li>All major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot).</li> <li>Social platform preview bots.</li> <li>Bing, Yandex, and Baidu, which do not execute JavaScript.</li> </ul> <p>Both layers are required; neither replaces the other.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Four Ways the JavaScript Indexing Problem Shows Up at Enterprise Scale</h2> <p>Enterprise teams invest in CDNs for legitimate reasons: delivery speed, origin protection, and Core Web Vitals. Those problems are solved. The deeper problem driving enterprise SEO anxiety today is different, because the JavaScript indexing issues CDNs cannot solve show up as:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Crawlers failing to access dynamically generated content.</li> <li>Pages missing from search indexes despite being live and accessible to users.</li> <li>Social shares returning broken or generic previews instead of rich cards.</li> <li>International markets not indexing pages correctly due to JavaScript-dependent hreflang and canonical signals.</li> </ul> <p>These are rendering problems. CDN infrastructure is not equipped to address them. Here’s how each one compounds at enterprise scale.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Problem 1: Google’s Two-Step Rendering Pipeline Creates Index Lag</h3> <p>Google processes JavaScript pages in two distinct phases, and the gap between them is where enterprise risk compounds.</p> <p>In the <strong>first phase</strong>, Googlebot fetches a URL and downloads the HTML served by the CDN. For JavaScript applications, that initial HTML is nearly empty. No content is indexed at this stage.</p> <p>In the <strong>second phase</strong>, Google’s Web Rendering Service (WRS) must execute the JavaScript rendering in a separate pass, often hours or days after the initial crawl. Because rendering is computationally expensive, JavaScript pages wait in this second queue on top of the standard crawl queue that all pages face.</p> <p><a href="https://vercel.com/blog/how-google-handles-javascript-throughout-the-indexing-process" type="link" id="https://vercel.com/blog/how-google-handles-javascript-throughout-the-indexing-process" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Analysis by Vercel and MERJ</a> across 37,000 pages also found that the slowest 1% took approximately 18 hours to render after crawl. For a site managing 50,000 URLs, that 1% represents 500 pages sitting unprocessed at any given moment.</p> <p>When 2,000 pages are updated overnight for a product launch, pages that clear the rendering queue quickly reflect the update. Pages still waiting in queue serve stale or empty content to Google, while your CDN cache and application servers are fully current.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Problem 2: AI Crawlers Driving Significant Traffic Do Not Execute JavaScript</h3> <p>GPTBot makes 569 million page requests per month on Vercel’s network alone. Anthropic’s ClaudeBot makes 370 million. PerplexityBot grew 157,490% year over year, according to <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/" type="link" id="https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Cloudflare’s data</a>. Combined, AI crawler traffic already represents approximately 28% of Googlebot’s total monthly request volume.</p> <p>But none of them can execute JavaScript. A <a href="https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler" type="link" id="https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">study</a> analyzing over half a billion bot visits confirmed that no major AI crawler executes JavaScript. They fetch raw HTML and extract whatever text is immediately present. If your content only exists after JavaScript runs, it isn’t there.</p> <p>Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and Claude.ai pull citation content from what their crawlers can actually read. AI citation visibility matters most on consideration-stage queries (product comparisons, pricing, technical specifications), where AI answers are increasingly displacing traditional search results. Enterprises not visible to AI crawlers now are building a disadvantage that will compound as that traffic grows.</p> <p><strong>Read: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/">Understanding Web Crawlers: Traditional vs. OpenAI’s Bots</a></strong></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Problem 3: Social Platform Crawlers Return Broken Previews—and Skew Your Attribution</h3> <p>Here’s the problem: most teams don’t catch that paid social posts render preview cards correctly, but organic shares don’t.</p> <p>When anyone shares a URL from a JavaScript-rendered page on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, or Slack, the platform’s crawler reads raw HTML. For applications where Open Graph tags only appear in the DOM after JavaScript runs, the crawler finds nothing and falls back to a bare URL—no image, no title, no description.</p> <p>Paid posts often render preview cards correctly because platforms process paid placements through different pipelines. So organic shares fail silently, attribution analysis reads the gap as paid outperforming organic on content quality grounds, and budget shifts accordingly. The misallocation persists as long as the rendering failure does.</p> <p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/linkedin-pages/5-non-obvious-ways-to-improve-your-linkedin-company-page" type="link" id="https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/linkedin-pages/5-non-obvious-ways-to-improve-your-linkedin-company-page" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">LinkedIn’s own data</a> shows posts with images generate twice the comment rate of those without. Every organic share from a JavaScript-rendered page defaults to a bare URL, and for an enterprise content operation distributing hundreds of assets monthly, that engagement gap compounds across everything.</p> <p>Marketing operations teams typically paper over this with manual workarounds: hardcoded Open Graph databases, pre-campaign URL submissions to platform debuggers, and manual preview checks before distribution. These don’t scale. Every workaround is a headcount tax on a problem infrastructure should solve.</p> <p><strong>Related: How <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-open-graph-tags-impact-llm-training-data/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-open-graph-tags-impact-llm-training-data/">Social Media and Open Graph Tags Impact LLM Training Data</a></strong></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Problem 4: Outside Google, JavaScript-Only Content is Effectively Invisible</h3> <p>For enterprises with international audiences, the rendering problem is significantly worse.</p> <p>Bing has <a href="https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/october-2018/bingbot-Series-JavaScript,-Dynamic-Rendering,-and-Cloaking-Oh-My" type="link" id="https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/october-2018/bingbot-Series-JavaScript,-Dynamic-Rendering,-and-Cloaking-Oh-My" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">publicly acknowledged</a> that rendering JavaScript at scale remains operationally difficult. Yandex does not execute JavaScript in its crawler at all. Baidu’s JavaScript support is limited, inconsistent, and changes without notice.</p> <p>These limitations directly affect international SEO because hreflang tags, canonical tags, and language-specific metadata are commonly implemented via JavaScript in modern frameworks. If those signals only exist in JavaScript output, every search engine that can’t execute JavaScript misses the international taxonomy entirely — potentially indexing wrong language versions in wrong markets, or generating duplicate content signals that suppress global rankings.</p> <p>For enterprises operating internationally, this doesn’t surface as a rendering error in standard monitoring. It shows up as organic traffic from non-Google markets declining without an obvious cause, by which point the gap has been compounding for months.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Popken Fashion Group Fixed Their International Indexing Gap</h2> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="How Popken Fashion Group Cut Costs by 50% with Prerender.io" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gIjlEa6JKro?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>Popken Fashion Group, Europe’s largest plus-sized retailer, manages SEO across 32 domains in 16 countries. When an internal issue forced them to briefly turn off <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a>, rankings dropped almost immediately across markets.</p> <p>When it was re-enabled, visibility began to recover within a week. In one market alone, approximately 15,000 additional pages were indexed after reactivation—with 50% cost savings over alternative solutions and no engineering lift required.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/">Read the full case study</a>.</p> <p>With the failure modes established, the next step is understanding exactly what each infrastructure layer does and where each one stops.</p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io">Get started with Prerender.io</a></div> </div> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">CDN vs Prerendering: What Each Layer Actually Does</h2> <p>The CDNs vs. Prerender.io distinction comes down to delivery vs. rendering, and which layer of your web infrastructure each operates at. Understanding what each one does (and where it stops) is the foundation for everything else in this article.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">What a CDN Does: The Delivery Layer</h3> <p>A content delivery network is a globally distributed caching and routing system. CDNs like Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, and AWS CloudFront deliver your site’s files faster by caching copies across hundreds of global locations. When a visitor requests a page, the nearest server responds instead of your origin server.</p> <p>For enterprise operations, this solves a specific set of problems:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Latency reduction:</strong> for a user in Singapore requesting content from a US-based origin, a CDN can reduce round-trip time from 200ms to under 20ms.</li> <li><strong>Origin protection:</strong> a well-configured CDN absorbs 80–90% of all requests at the edge, preventing origin saturation during product launches or traffic spikes.</li> <li><strong>Core Web Vitals:</strong> asset compression, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 multiplexing, and geographically proximate delivery directly improve LCP, FID, and CLS scores.</li> <li><strong>Security:</strong> TLS termination and DDoS mitigation at the network layer reduce cryptographic overhead on application servers.</li> </ul> <p>For user experience and performance, CDNs are essential. But they serve files, not rendered pages. For a JavaScript application, those files include an HTML skeleton, typically a near-empty <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><div id="root"></div></code></mark></code>, and JavaScript bundles containing the instructions for building the actual page. A browser executes those bundles; crawlers don’t.</p> <p>At scale, an unrendered site is an invisible site. That is the boundary of what a CDN can deliver, but Prerender.io starts exactly where the CDN stops.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">What Prerender.io Does: The Rendering Layer</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> addresses whether the content JavaScript generates is accessible to crawlers that cannot execute it.</p> <p>With <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a>, a fleet of headless Chrome browser instances loads each page in a full Chrome environment, executes all JavaScript, waits for API calls to resolve, and captures the fully built HTML output through HTML snapshot generation.</p> <p>That snapshot contains everything a crawler needs: fully rendered text, canonical tags, structured data markup, Open Graph tags, hreflang attributes, and all other metadata generated dynamically by JavaScript. The JavaScript code is stripped from the snapshot because crawlers need the output, not the instructions.</p> <p>Routing logic at the CDN or server layer inspects each request’s user-agent string and directs traffic accordingly. Bot requests are served the pre-built HTML snapshot. Human visitors receive the JavaScript application through the CDN with full interactivity intact. Both paths run in parallel with no user-facing impact.</p> <p>For cached pages, Prerender.io delivers HTML snapshots in 30–50 milliseconds — faster than most web servers respond. Rendering happens once and is cached, so application servers are never involved in crawler responses. Cache freshness is configurable from 6 hours to 30 days, with different refresh schedules per page type. An e-commerce site might refresh product page snapshots every 12 hours to keep pricing and availability current, while refreshing blog content weekly.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="624" height="296" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-Prerender.io-works.jpg" alt="How Prerender.io works" class="wp-image-9418" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-Prerender.io-works.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-Prerender.io-works-300x142.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How CDN and Prerender.io Work Together: Dynamic Rendering</h2> <p>The system connecting these layers is called dynamic rendering, which Google introduced in 2018 as an official solution for JavaScript-heavy sites.</p> <p>When a request arrives at your CDN, routing logic reads the user-agent string to determine whether the requester is a human or a bot. Bot requests are routed to Prerender.io, which returns a pre-built HTML snapshot. Human requests follow the normal path through the CDN to the JavaScript application.</p> <p>Both paths run simultaneously without interfering with each other. Akamai itself published a blog post explaining how Prerender.io <a href="https://www.akamai.com/blog/developers/improve-seo-with-prerender-io" type="link" id="https://www.akamai.com/blog/developers/improve-seo-with-prerender-io" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">solves the JavaScript indexing gap left by CDNs</a>—when your CDN vendor publicly documents the need for a prerendering layer on top of their own infrastructure, the architectural boundary between these two technologies is settled.</p> <p><strong>Related: <a href="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/how-does-prerender-work-with-cdns-like-cloudflare-fastly-or-akamai" type="link" id="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/how-does-prerender-work-with-cdns-like-cloudflare-fastly-or-akamai">Prerender.io’s dedicated integration guides for Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai</a>.</strong></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">CDN vs. Prerender.io: Side-by-Side Comparison</h2> <figure class="wp-block-table"><table class="has-fixed-layout"><thead><tr><th class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Feature</th><th class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">CDN</th><th class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Prerender.io</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Primary function</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">File delivery and caching</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">JavaScript rendering for crawlers</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Executes JavaScript</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">No</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Yes (headless Chrome)</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Improves Core Web Vitals</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Yes</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">No direct impact</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Covers Google</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Delivery only</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Full rendered HTML</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Covers AI crawlers</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Delivery only</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Full rendered HTML</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Covers Bing, Yandex, Baidu</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Delivery only</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Full rendered HTML</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Covers social preview bots</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Delivery only</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Full rendered HTML</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Deployment complexity</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Moderate</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Hours, no code changes</td></tr><tr><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left"><strong>Works without the other</strong></td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">For users, yes. For crawlers, no.</td><td class="has-text-align-left" data-align="left">Requires CDN for delivery</td></tr></tbody></table></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Not Just Use Server-Side Rendering?</h2> <p>Google recommends server-side rendering (SSR) as a solution to JavaScript indexing problems. The recommendation is technically sound. The implementation reality is different.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-srr-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-srr-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/">Full SSR migration</a> costs $120,000 or more upfront, plus ongoing maintenance requiring specialized engineering. It demands changes across the entire application: server configuration, build processes, data management between server and browser, and often a complete framework migration. The timeline typically spans 3–6 months for large codebases.</p> <p>SSR also addresses primarily one crawler: Google. Bing, Yandex, social media bots, and AI crawlers are not guaranteed to properly receive server-rendered pages, especially when CDN caching settings interfere with delivery.</p> <p>Prerender.io deploys in hours without code changes. Because it connects at the CDN level, a single rendering layer covers the entire ecosystem of JavaScript-blind bots: Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, every major social platform, and every AI crawler driving traffic today.</p> <p>For most enterprise teams, SSR is an architectural aspiration. Prerender.io is the infrastructure decision you can make this week.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Prerender.io: The Architecture Running at Enterprises Like Walmart, Spotify, and Domino’s</h2> <p>The longer you wait to add a rendering layer, the more ground you’re conceding to competitors already visible in AI-generated answers, social previews, and international search indexes. Your CDN is doing its job. The question is whether the content it’s delivering at speed is actually reaching the crawlers that determine your organic revenue.</p> <p>For enterprises managing thousands of dynamic URLs (where organic search, social sharing, and AI-driven discoverability directly impact pipeline), every SEO investment you’ve made in content, technical optimization, link building, and paid amplification depends on one thing: crawlers being able to read the pages.</p> <p>Prerender.io is the infrastructure layer that makes sure they can. <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Get started today and see what crawlers are actually seeing on your site today.</a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">FAQs About JavaScript SEO, CDNs, and Prerendering</h2> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Why is My Site Fast but Not Ranking in Google or LLMs?</h3> <p>Speed and visibility are solved at different infrastructure layers. If your site loads in under two seconds but pages are missing from Google’s index, the problem is rendering, not delivery. For JavaScript applications, your CDN is serving crawlers an empty HTML shell. The content that should be indexed only exists after JavaScript executes, which most crawlers cannot do. A prerendering layer like <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> solves this by serving crawlers a fully rendered HTML snapshot instead.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Do CDNs Help With SEO Indexing?</h3> <p>CDNs improve delivery speed and Core Web Vitals scores, both of which are Google ranking signals. However, CDNs cannot solve JavaScript indexing issues because they do not execute code. A CDN delivers files to crawlers at speed; whether those files contain readable content is outside the CDN’s scope entirely. For JavaScript-rendered sites, you need a separate rendering layer alongside your CDN.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. What is the Difference Between Server-Side Rendering and Prerendering?</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-srr-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-srr-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/">Server-side rendering (SSR)</a> rebuilds your application architecture so pages are generated on the server before being sent to the browser. For enterprise codebases, SSR migration is a significant engineering undertaking that typically spans multiple months and costs $120,000 or more. Prerendering captures fully rendered HTML snapshots of your existing JavaScript pages and serves them to crawlers on request, without touching application code. SSR is an architectural decision. Prerendering is an infrastructure layer added on top of what you already have, and it can be deployed in hours.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Which Search Engines and Crawlers Does Prerender.io Cover?</h3> <p>Prerender.io covers every major crawler: Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, all major social platform preview bots (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Slack), and all major AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. Any requester identified as a bot via the user-agent string receives the pre-rendered HTML snapshot, solving JavaScript indexing issues across the full crawler ecosystem, not just Google.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Why Are My Pages Invisible to AI Crawlers Like GPTBot and PerplexityBot?</h3> <p>AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. They fetch raw HTML and extract whatever text is immediately present. For JavaScript-rendered applications, that means AI crawlers see the same empty HTML shell your CDN serves: no content, no metadata, nothing to index or cite.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>How to Prepare Your Enterprise Website for Agentic AI</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-enterprise-site-for-agentic-ai/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 06:42:15 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[AI SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=9274</guid> <description><![CDATA[Find out how to get your enterprise website ready for agentic AI by improving visibility, access, and usability for AI agents driving transactions.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>AI agents for ecommerce are already completing B2B procurement workflows autonomously: filtering catalogs, comparing specifications, and initiating purchase orders without a human in the loop. If your enterprise site can’t return usable HTML on first request, those AI agents leave and convert on a competitor’s site instead.</p> <p>Bain estimates U.S. agentic commerce could reach $300 billion to $500 billion by <a href="https://www.bain.com/insights/2030-forecast-how-agentic-ai-will-reshape-us-retail-snap-chart/" type="link" id="https://www.bain.com/insights/2030-forecast-how-agentic-ai-will-reshape-us-retail-snap-chart/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">2030</a>. The procurement workflows driving that figure are already active. For large enterprise sites built on JavaScript frameworks, this is a revenue problem hiding in plain sight, operating silently and invisible to every monitoring system in your stack.</p> <p>This article maps the SEO hurdles that prevent enterprise agentic AI from completing workflows on your site and their commercial consequences at each stage.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">TL;DR: The 5-Step Enterprise Agentic AI Website Preparation Sequence</h2> <p>Enterprise sites lose agentic transactions at five points, in this order:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>The AI agent is blocked before it arrives</strong>: robots.txt rules built for training crawlers are now blocking transactional agents.</li> <li><strong>The AI agent hits a blank page</strong>: JavaScript-heavy pages return empty HTML to agents that can’t execute scripts.</li> <li><strong>The AI agent can’t navigate</strong>: poor semantic structure leaves agents without a path through large catalogs.</li> <li><strong>The AI agent can’t interpret the content</strong>: HTML parsing overhead causes spec errors, price misreads, and availability failures.</li> <li><strong>The AI agent can’t complete the transaction</strong>: multi-step procurement flows built for browsers have no interface for agents.</li> </ol> <p>Each failure point relies on the previous one. No fixes later in the process are effective until the rendering layer functions properly. This is also the order we follow in this article.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Agentic AI vs. Generative AI: Why Enterprise Sites Face a Different Problem</h2> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="624" height="351" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Agentic-AI-vs.-Generative-AI.jpg" alt="Agentic AI vs. Generative AI" class="wp-image-9278" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Agentic-AI-vs.-Generative-AI.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Agentic-AI-vs.-Generative-AI-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p>The distinction between agentic AI vs. generative AI determines what category of problem you actually have.</p> <p><strong>Generative AI systems</strong>, such as the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, primarily visit your site to extract information. When they miss a page or misread a product description, the cost is <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-get-indexed-on-ai-platforms/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-get-indexed-on-ai-platforms/">reduced presence in AI-generated answers</a>. This is a citation and visibility problem.</p> <p><strong>Agentic AI systems</strong>, on the other hand, visit your site to execute tasks. An AI agent acting on behalf of a procurement manager might filter a product catalog, compare vendor specifications, check pricing, and initiate a purchase order, all without a human in the loop.</p> <p>When that process fails, the consequence is transactional. The agent moves to the next vendor it can work with and completes the purchase there. At this point, enterprise sites face the highest exposure because the gap between what agents need and what they deliver is widest at scale.</p> <p>The same factors that create excellent user experiences are also the conditions that block AI agents at each stage of the buying journey. This includes:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>JavaScript-heavy architectures.</li> <li>Dynamic content.</li> <li>Personalized catalog pages.</li> <li>Complex checkout flows.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Read more: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/ai-friendly-vs-ai-agent-friendly-websites/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-5" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/ai-friendly-vs-ai-agent-friendly-websites/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-5">Guide to AI-friendly vs. AI-agent-friendly websites</a>.</strong></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Failure Points: Where Enterprise Sites Lose Transactions</h2> <p>Each failure point below maps an agent’s journey through your site from entry to exit. They follow a sequence, so fixing downstream problems without addressing upstream ones accomplishes nothing, because the agent never reaches the downstream stages.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. The AI Agent is Blocked Before it Arrives</h3> <p>Most enterprises configured <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-for-ecommerce-seo/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-for-ecommerce-seo/">robots.txt</a> rules during the generative AI crawling wave to control how their content was used in training and summaries. That made sense at the time, when the goal was limiting visibility and protecting content from being scraped.</p> <p>However, agentic AI changes the implications of those decisions. An agent blocked by robots.txt cannot reach your content, navigate your catalog, or initiate a purchase. What was once a content governance measure is now a direct barrier to revenue.</p> <p>As a result, enterprises need to reassess their access controls. Robots.txt rules should distinguish between training crawlers and transactional agents, rather than treating them the same. At the same time, emerging standards like llms.txt point toward a more granular approach to managing how AI systems access and interact with site content.</p> <p>Where robots.txt was designed for a world of human browsers and search engine crawlers, llms.txt allows site owners to specify which content is available for AI summarisation versus transactional access: a distinction robots.txt was never designed to make.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. The AI Agent Hits a Blank Page</h3> <p>This is the most common failure in enterprise agentic AI, making every other optimization irrelevant if left unaddressed.</p> <p>Many modern enterprise sites are built on <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/angularjs-pros-cons-and-optimization/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/angularjs-pros-cons-and-optimization/">JavaScript rendering frameworks</a>. The initial HTML payload these frameworks return contains little meaningful content. Product descriptions, pricing, availability, and filters all load dynamically after JavaScript executes. For a human browser, the process is invisible, but for AI agents making an HTTP request without a headless browser, the page arrives empty.</p> <p>This is the AI agents and JavaScript rendering compatibility problem at the center of agentic commerce: the transaction collapses before it starts.</p> <p>At enterprise scale, this rendering gap is significant, affecting catalog, product detail, pricing, and checkout pages, which are all typically rendered client-side and effectively invisible to agents that can’t execute JavaScript.</p> <p>This can be solved at the infrastructure level without architectural changes or framework migrations, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/other-rendering-options-vs-prerendering/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/other-rendering-options-vs-prerendering/">using prerendering</a>—more on that in the next section.</p> <div class="wp-block-buttons has-custom-font-size has-small-font-size is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link wp-element-button" href="https://auth.prerender.io/auth/realms/prerender/protocol/openid-connect/registrations?client_id=prerender-frontend&response_type=code&scope=openid%20email&redirect_uri=https://dashboard.prerender.io/integration-wizard&_gl=1*16wzsn*_gcl_au*MTM3MTk0ODIyOS4xNzczNzI0MzY3*_ga*MTM3NDU1ODIzNC4xNzMxOTk4MzUx*_ga_5C99FX76HR*czE3Nzg2ODAzNzYkbzI4MCRnMCR0MTc3ODY4MDM5NCRqNDIkbDAkaDU0ODY2MjYwMw..">Try Prerender.io for free</a></div> </div> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. The AI Agent Can’t Navigate to the Right Page</h3> <p>Rendered content solves the reading problem, but agents also need to navigate enterprise sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs. This navigation depends on semantic HTML.</p> <p>Semantic HTML for AI is how agents understand page hierarchy and relationships. Tags like <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><nav></code></mark></code>, <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><main></code></mark></code>, <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><article></code></mark></code>, and <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><section></code></mark></code>, combined with a consistent heading hierarchy, give agents a structural map of the site. Without them, the agent moves through a flat document with no landmarks.</p> <p>On small sites, poor semantic structure is a minor friction. On enterprise catalogs, it is a transaction routing failure. Agents that can’t navigate websites efficiently stall at category landing pages, fail to reach the correct product variant, or exit the session before reaching a transactable page.</p> <p>An agent shopping for a specific SKU that lands on a category page with no structural path forward doesn’t try harder; it tries your competitor. Each of those outcomes is a sale that goes to a competitor with a cleaner site structure.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. The AI Agent Can’t Interpret What it’s Reading</h3> <p>An agent that can read and navigate to a page still needs to understand what it is looking at. Enterprise product pages are designed for human comprehension, but agents don’t perceive any of that. They process the underlying content, and when that content arrives as raw HTML, the parsing overhead is substantial.</p> <p>A product page with three paragraphs of description also contains navigation markup, tracking scripts, class attributes, and layers of wrapper elements with no semantic value. The agent processes all of it to extract the relevant content.</p> <p>This is where Markdown for AI agents has emerged as the practical content delivery approach. Markdown strips presentational noise and leaves clean, structured content that agents can parse with significantly less overhead. <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents/" type="link" id="https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Cloudflare’s research</a> documents that agents extract information more reliably from Markdown-formatted content than from HTML loaded with class names, nested div structures, and inline styles.</p> <p>The commercial implication is direct. An agent reading a clean Markdown version of a product page reaches the pricing, specifications, and availability faster, with fewer tokens consumed and less room for misinterpretation. At scale, that parsing overhead produces real errors: specs misread, prices misquoted, availability misreported. Across thousands of agent sessions, that compounds directly into transaction failures.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. The AI Agent Can’t Execute the Task</h3> <p>An agent that can reach, read, navigate, and accurately interpret your content still needs a mechanism to complete the workflow. On most enterprise sites, that mechanism doesn’t exist for agents.</p> <p>Multi-step procurement processes assume a user is managing each interaction. From form submissions to authentication handoffs and dynamic pricing confirmations, all depend on browser behavior that agents don’t replicate. So when an agent reaches the execution stage on a site built exclusively for human interaction, it encounters a structural incompatibility difficult to navigate past.</p> <p>The commercial consequence of this is that an agent that completes every prior stage and then fails at execution is a completed sales process that generates no revenue. The agent invested the full workflow on your site and converted on a competitor site.</p> <p>At enterprise scale, across B2B procurement workflows where purchase order values are significant, that failure repeats silently across every agent-driven session your site can’t complete.</p> <p>This is where a <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol" type="link" id="https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Model Context Protocol (MCP)</a> becomes commercially relevant. MCP AI protocols give agents a standardized interface to interact with external services and systems. In practice, MCP gives an agent the ability to authenticate, submit forms, trigger API calls, and confirm transactions: the programmatic equivalent of a checkout flow built for machines, not browsers. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/mcp-future-ai-search-marketing-454865" type="link" id="https://searchengineland.com/mcp-future-ai-search-marketing-454865" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Search Engine Land</a> and <a href="https://www.wix.com/studio/ai-search-lab/agentic-ai-protocols" type="link" id="https://www.wix.com/studio/ai-search-lab/agentic-ai-protocols" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Wix’s AI Search Lab</a> confirm that MCP is rapidly becoming the baseline expectation for transactional agentic interactions.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Enterprise Agentic AI Optimization Starts with Prerendering</h2> <p>ChatGPT Operator, SAP Joule, and agents built on Salesforce Agentforce and Coupa are already executing workflows that include vendor evaluation and purchase initiation. Site accessibility now directly influences whether a vendor is considered at all.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/">Prerendering for AI agents</a> is how JS-dependent enterprise sites re-enter these workflows—and Prerender.io is where that starts.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> operates as a middleware layer between incoming agent requests and your website. When an agent requests a page, it intercepts the request, executes your JavaScript, and returns a fully rendered HTML snapshot without architectural changes or framework migrations. It integrates with any existing JavaScript stack and supports large-scale environments through cache control, crawl budget management, and selective rendering rules.</p> <p>On, a global premium sportswear brand operating across more than 60 countries ran into this exact problem during a major front-end update in 2023.</p> <p>JavaScript rendering failures cascaded across every revenue channel simultaneously, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-fix-disapproved-google-ads/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-fix-disapproved-google-ads/">Google Shopping Ads disapprovals</a>, indexing failures across global markets, and <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-fix-link-previews/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-fix-link-previews/">broken social previews</a>. Server-side rendering would have taken months of engineering work and pulled the development team off the product roadmap. Prerender.io was implemented instead. These are the results over three years:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>+67% increase in Google organic traffic.</li> <li>+98% increase in Bing traffic.</li> <li>Up to $1M in annual Google Ad revenue protected.</li> <li>Millions of dollars saved annually versus the SSR alternative.</li> </ul> <p><strong><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/on-prerender/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/on-prerender/">Read the full case study</a>.</strong></p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="624" height="351" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Prerender.io-case-study-results.jpg" alt="Prerender.io case study results" class="wp-image-9294" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Prerender.io-case-study-results.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Prerender.io-case-study-results-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p><em>“Prerender.io offers the strongest combination of stability, speed, and value.”</em> — Marilena Pixner, Senior Organic Growth and SEO Specialist, On</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p></p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Final Thoughts on Agentic AI Optimization for Enterprise Websites</h2> <p>Agentic commerce is already operational. The five failure points above are the full sequence: fix them in order, starting with rendering, and enterprise sites re-enter procurement workflows they’re currently excluded from. Skip the sequence or start in the middle, and optimization is happening on a path no agent travels.</p> <p>Let Prerender.io be where your preparation starts. It won’t solve every failure point above, but without it, none of the others are reachable.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Get started with Prerender.io</a> today and secure your website’s accessibility to agent-driven workflows.</strong></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Enterprise Agentic AI: Frequently Asked Questions</h2> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Why Can’t AI Agents Render JavaScript?</h3> <p>AI agents make a basic HTTP request and process whatever the server returns immediately: no browser, no script execution, no waiting. On <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/">enterprise JavaScript-heavy sites</a>, that first response is near-empty HTML. Pricing, availability, and product content that loads dynamically never arrive. The agent reads a blank page and exits.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. How Does Agentic Search Differ From Traditional AI Search?</h3> <p>Traditional AI search—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews—retrieves and summarises information. The output is an answer. Agentic search evaluates options and completes a task on the user’s behalf. The output is an action, usually a transaction. A visibility failure in traditional search costs you a citation. A failure in agentic search costs you the sale.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. How Can Enterprise Websites Prepare for AI Agents?</h3> <p>In sequence: unblock agent access via robots.txt and llms.txt, solve the rendering layer so JS-heavy pages return complete HTML, add semantic structure so agents can navigate your catalog, clean up your content layer for machine readability, then expose procurement workflows through APIs or MCP. Each step depends on the one before it: the rendering layer has to come first.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. What is Prerendering for AI Agents?</h3> <p>It means generating fully rendered HTML versions of JavaScript-dependent pages so agents receive complete content on first request (product descriptions, pricing, availability) rather than an empty shell. <a href="https://docs.prerender.io" type="link" id="https://docs.prerender.io">See how Prerender.io handles this technically.</a></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. What is the Commercial Risk of Ignoring Enterprise Agentic AI Optimization?</h3> <p>Silent, ongoing transaction loss that doesn’t appear in standard analytics. Agents that can’t interact with your site don’t bounce visibly; they exit and convert with a competitor. At enterprise scale, across B2B procurement workflows with significant order values, that failure repeats across every agent-driven session your site can’t complete. Estimate what inaccessible pages are costing you with the <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/roi-calculator/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/roi-calculator/">ROI calculator</a>.</p> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>From On-Running.com to On.com: A Conversation with Max Woelfle, SEO Lead at On</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/podcast-max-woelfle-on/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 10:28:05 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[AI SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Podcast]]></category> <category><![CDATA[agentic AI]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ai podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[tech podcasts]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=9240</guid> <description><![CDATA[Max Woelfle, SEO Lead at On—Prerender client and one of the world's leading athletic brands—joins the Get Discovered podcast.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>A successful domain migration doesn’t mean AI models understand your brand correctly. Global sportswear brand On found that out the hard way.</p> <p>In this episode of the <em>Get Discovered </em>podcast, we sit down with Max Woelfle, SEO Team Lead at On, one of the fastest-growing athletic brands in the world and a Prerender.io client since 2023.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1000" height="525" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/on-running-1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-8730" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/on-running-1.jpg 1000w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/on-running-1-300x158.jpg 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/on-running-1-768x403.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure> <p>Together, we talk about what the brand’s move from on-running.com to on.com revealed about AI training data, entity confusion, and why the technical foundations brands lay today will determine their visibility in an agentic world.</p> <p>Watch the full episode below or read on for key takeaways.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="From On-Running.com to On.com: A Conversation With Max Woelfle from a Global Sportswear Brand" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c34ia_a9t3Q?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">A “Successful” Domain Migration With a Hidden Catch</h2> <p>In early 2024, On made a significant brand move by migrating from on-running.com to on.com. The two-letter domain reflected the brand’s ambition to grow beyond running into a global sports brand, and from a pure SEO standpoint, it worked. Traffic dipped for a few weeks and then bounced back to its pre-migration growth trajectory, which at the time felt like a clean win.</p> <p>About eighteen months later, though, Max’s team started noticing something strange. When they examined how AI models talked about On in isolation, looking at the base model without live retrieval, “on-running.com” still loomed large. Years of training data from Reddit threads, product reviews, and news coverage were pointing to a different domain than the one that On now calls home.</p> <p>“I didn’t, at the time, think about the training models or the training that was happening for the models,” Max explains. “And we see now how sometimes signals are blurry.”</p> <p>The underlying issue comes down to a distinction that matters far more now than it did three years ago: the difference between the training phase and the retrieval phase. When you ask ChatGPT a question today, you’re getting an answer shaped by two very different inputs. The first is the base model, which represents years of web data baked in during training that forms the model’s foundational understanding of the world. The second is live retrieval (RAG), which pulls in current information to supplement or correct what the model already “knows.”</p> <p>From a user’s perspective, these two sources are completely invisible because you get one unified answer. But underneath that answer, the base model might be pulling On toward “on-running.com” while live retrieval corrects it to <a href="http://on.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">“on.com</a>.” That kind of collision creates subtle inconsistencies that brands rarely catch, and especially in 2024 when Max and his team made the switch.</p> <p>“If you just look at it from a user perspective, everything looks fine,” Max says. “It doesn’t necessarily work for the entire ecosystem that is AI nowadays.”</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Three Entities, One Brand</h2> <p>The domain migration also brought a deeper issue into focus. Over the years, On had accumulated not one but three distinct entities in the training data that models were trying to reconcile: On Cloud, a popular shoe model that over time became a shorthand for the brand itself; On Running, the original brand identity; and On, where the brand is headed today.</p> <p>Reddit, product reviews, and press coverage had spent years interchangeably using all three, and models trained on that data have to make sense of it somehow. At the live interface level, they often manage it. But at the base model level, the picture gets messy.</p> <p>“If I ask ChatGPT right now, it would be ‘On,’ in parentheses, formerly known as On Running,” Max explains. “But if I really only look at the base models, very often you get this mixed up. It’s OnCloud, and that’s the company name.”</p> <p>The practical consequence goes well beyond a branding annoyance. When AI models are working with confused or conflicting entity information, errors multiply across the answers they generate: incorrect headquarters locations, missing product attributions, and wrong contact information. That last one is where the problem becomes a real consumer issue.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Incorrect AI Answers Are a Real Consumer Problem</h2> <p>Consider the scenario Max raised: a customer wants to file a warranty claim and asks ChatGPT for On’s warranty contact number. If the underlying data is wrong, or if the most accurate version of that information lives on a JavaScript-heavy page that AI crawlers couldn’t process, that customer gets the wrong number and has nowhere obvious to turn.</p> <p>“There’s a consumer at the other side that wants to return a shoe,” Max says. “They will just take the ChatGPT answer for face value, and it’s our job to fix that.”</p> <p>This is where JavaScript rendering—and a solution like Prerender.io—enters the picture, says Max. Many brands store their most current, accurate information, covering things like headquarters, contact details, product specs, and return policies, on pages that are heavily client-side rendered. Google has spent years building a crawler sophisticated enough to handle most JavaScript, but AI crawlers haven’t yet matched that pace. It’s why Max and his team at On have been using Prerender.io since 2023.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="AI crawlers can't always process JavaScript: why On uses Prerender.io" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/adHoOdY_mMc?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>The result is that a brand’s most recent and most accurate information may be completely invisible to the models that millions of people are now asking for recommendations and answers, while the static, older version of that information, from before a rebrand, a move, or a policy change, gets baked into the training data instead.</p> <p>This gap is particularly wide for smaller or faster-growing companies. Brands the size of Nike are referenced by so many third-party sources that any single source of confusion tends to get corrected naturally. A brand that has been growing fast for the last five years, with most of its accurate information living on a modern JavaScript stack, is far more exposed to this problem.</p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/on-prerender/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">How On Saves Millions Per Year with Prerender.io</a></em></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Measuring Organic Growth When the Click Disappears</h2> <p>Alongside the AI visibility challenge, Max is grappling with a measurement problem that every organic growth team is now facing (and one we’ve explored at length on this podcast): how do you demonstrate the value of search when AI conversations don’t generate clicks?</p> <p>The old model had a comfortable, if imperfect, logic to it. You could trace a reasonably clear line from impressions in Search Console through click-through rates to sessions on the website and eventually to revenue. That model is now fragmenting because the discovery phase, the moment when someone decides which brand to actually consider, has increasingly moved into AI conversations that leave no footprint in your analytics.</p> <p>“We know that people are prompting and having conversations with AI, and we know roughly how many users ChatGPT has,” Max explains. “But we have no reliable way of measuring that because the only people who have that data are the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.”</p> <p>On has started running display ads on ChatGPT, which at least generates impression data tied loosely to conversation topics. Max also uses a simple proxy to make the scale legible internally: if roughly 1% of AI conversations result in a click-out based on available signals, then 1,000 sessions from AI on your site implies around 100,000 conversations where your brand came up. That’s not a precise measurement, but it’s a useful order-of-magnitude reality check for stakeholders who are used to thinking in clicks.</p> <p>The harder internal challenge is making the case for investment when the raw traffic numbers from AI channels are smaller than what Bing drives. It takes real work to argue that a channel with modest visible traffic deserves serious attention. Studies show that <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/niklas-buschner-from-radyant/">AI search contributes to pipeline 15x-30x more</a> than you think.</p> <p>“You have to at one point say that we don’t know exact numbers,” Max says. “But I do think it’s a fair assumption to say: if we don’t show up in any of the prompts around this topic, we won’t be showing up in any of the conversations around this topic.”</p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> </em><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/common-mistakes-on-javascript-ecommerce-sites/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>5 Common Mistakes on JavaScript Ecommerce Sites</em></a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Who Owns AI Discovery Inside a Brand?</h2> <p>One of the more practically useful threads in this conversation is about organizational structure. AI discovery cuts across SEO, product, engineering, PR, and analytics, and in most companies, nobody has formally claimed ownership of it.</p> <p>At On, Max explains how the company has overhauled this entirely in a year-long test. Now, his team is known as the Organic Growth team internally, rather than simply SEO. He explains that they’re the coordinating layer that brings stakeholders together without trying to own everything. In the same way that his team once managed shopping feeds by connecting developers, product managers, and data owners, they are now doing the same for GEO and AI visibility, acting as the connective tissue rather than the sole executor.</p> <p>“The idea is that all of this will turn into business as usual,” Max says. “Discovery should be addressed by the whole company anyway.”</p> <p>In practice at On, this means PR teams are becoming more digitally minded on how brand activity translates into AI-accessible signals, analytics teams are taking on prompt monitoring as a standard function, and developers increasingly understand why server-side rendering matters for AI crawlers. The Organic Growth team is not large enough to do all of it, but it can set the standards and make sure the right people are connected to each other.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Agentic Commerce: Build the Foundation Now, Even If Volume Is Low</h2> <p>To conclude, the conversation turned to something that is still more future than present, though perhaps not by as much as people assume.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Agentic commerce</a> is the idea that AI agents will eventually shop on behalf of consumers, researching, comparing, and purchasing without the human ever visiting a brand’s website. Max is clear that mass-market adoption is not coming tomorrow—something that <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/marius-meiners-peec-ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Marius Meiners, CEO of Peec AI, also echoed on the Get Discovered podcast</a>—but he is equally clear that waiting for it to arrive before preparing is the wrong approach.</p> <p>His analogy is a useful one. When did you first buy something on your phone? For most people, it was well after the iPhone made it technically possible, because the technology was ready years before consumers trusted it enough to act on it. Agentic commerce is in a similar early phase, technically feasible for a small group of early adopters but nowhere near mainstream.</p> <p>“I don’t think it comes as fast as the companies that are thinking about going public wanted us to believe,” Max says. “But we need to make sure the technical possibilities are there. The same way that you have to have your website crawlable, the same way you should have your products shoppable in an agentic world.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="How to prepare for agentic commerce? Get your technical foundations in place" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cIHgFTpOqjI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>For On, that means treating agentic commerce the way good engineering teams treat infrastructure: build it correctly even when the usage numbers are modest, so there is a foundation to iterate on. Ten agentic conversions this year still give you a year-over-year baseline for next year, which is more than you have if you wait.</p> <p>In Max’s perspective, the brands that will win in an agentic world are not the ones that react when the volume arrives. They’re the ones that made themselves technically visible, entity-clear, and crawlable long before.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tune Into the Full Conversation</h2> <p>Listen to the full episode of the <em>Get Discovered</em> podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes with marketing and SEO leaders navigating the AI discovery challenge in real time.</p> <p>To connect with Max, you can find him on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-woelfle-444354b/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">LinkedIn</a>. Learn more about On at <a href="http://on.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">on.com</a>. </p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Spotify Embed: From On-Running.com to On.com: Max Woelfle, SEO Lead at a Global Sportswear Brand" style="border-radius: 12px" width="100%" height="152" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/6ZgVjbwbKBY69OFqegu5Io?si=svNYkY6ySYGrF--C-pAnNQ&utm_source=oembed"></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About Prerender.io</h2> <p>Prerender.io is a leading SEO solution that helps modern websites ensure their JavaScript-heavy pages are fully visible to search engines and AI tools. Trusted by companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Walmart, Prerender is the go-to partner for businesses navigating the future of SEO and AI-driven discoverability. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Start for free today or talk to sales for an Enterprise solution</a>.</p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-16018d1d wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" style="border-radius:0px;background-color:#1f8511">Try Prerender.io For Free</a></div> </div> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Prerender.io Announces Strategic Partnership with CDA Group</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/prerender-io-announces-strategic-partnership-with-cda-group/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 10:04:17 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[News and Updates]]></category> <category><![CDATA[CDA group]]></category> <category><![CDATA[partnership announcements]]></category> <category><![CDATA[partnerships]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=8295</guid> <description><![CDATA[Prerender.io and UK-based agency CDA Group announce a new partnership. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Prerender.io is excited to announce a new strategic partnership with CDA Group, a UK-based full-service digital agency specialising in ecommerce, websites, and digital marketing.</p> <p>CDA has spent over a decade helping businesses sell online, focusing on building and integrating ecommerce platforms across Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Their clients range from heritage British retailers to global names like Bacardi and Segway. </p> <p>This partnership brings together CDA’s ecommerce expertise and Prerender.io’s technical SEO infrastructure to solve a common problem in web development and an overlapping vertical for both parties.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Where This Started</h2> <p>Many of CDA’s clients run sophisticated, JavaScript-heavy storefronts. As such, a growing number of crawlers can’t efficiently crawl and execute the pages. The result can be a product catalogue that’s technically live, but lacking visibility across all search platforms. This leads to declining traffic, low indexation, and products that are hidden in AI search. </p> <p>This is a common situation for agencies managing complex builds, and one that typically gets raised after a migration, a rebuild, or when testing picks up that a site isn’t performing the way it should. Prerender.io addresses this directly. By serving pre-rendered HTML in place of raw JavaScript, it gives search engines a complete, readable version of every page without changing anything for users.</p> <p>And as AI search grows, the problem compounds. AI crawlers struggle to execute JavaScript even more than Google, meaning ecommerce businesses risk their most important content being invisible where it matters most. And with agentic commerce around the corner, a solution like Prerender.io <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/">bulletproofs ecommerce businesses</a> for the future.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p><em>“Prerender.io fills a gap that too many ecommerce businesses don’t even know they have, and it does it without making our builds more complicated. That matters a lot.” <br>– Shannon Greenall, Director at CDA Group</em></p> </blockquote> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Benefits of the Partnership</h2> <p>For CDA Group, this partnership means better visibility across their dozens of clients. This means:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Full product catalogue visibility for search engines and AI crawlers</li> <li>Faster indexation of new and updated pages</li> <li>Improved Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed scores </li> <li>A seamless plug-and-play integration with existing CDA-managed platforms and systems</li> </ul> <p>This is where CDA Group and Prerender.io are well aligned: CDA builds the platforms, and Prerender makes sure they’re seen.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p><em>“CDA Group is exactly the kind of agency we love working with. Technically capable with a focus on ecommerce, and genuinely client-focused. Their ecommerce clients are running some complex builds, and we ensure that this important information is visible to crawlers and customers.</em>“<em><br> – Marcos Withington, Head of Partnerships at Prerender.io</em></p> </blockquote> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About CDA Group</h2> <p><a href="https://cda.group/">CDA Group</a> is a UK-based full-service digital agency with expertise in ecommerce, website development, booking systems, lead generation, and digital marketing. They build integrated, results-driven solutions for businesses across retail, consumer goods, and beyond, with a client portfolio that includes brands such as Bacardi, Segway, Cartwright & Butler, and Charles Bentley.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About Prerender.io</h2> <p><a href="http://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> is a technical SEO solution that helps websites ensure their JavaScript content is fully visible to search engines and generative AI tools. Used by thousands of companies worldwide, including Microsoft and Walmart, Prerender solves critical SEO challenges for modern websites.</p> <p><em>Interested in becoming a Prerender.io partner?</em> <a href="https://prerender.io/partners/"><em>Get in touch</em>.</a></p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-16018d1d wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" style="border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;background-color:#2da01d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Try Prerender.io for Free</a></div> </div> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Why AI Contributes to Pipeline 15-30x More Than You Think: Niklas Buschner, CEO of Radyant</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/niklas-buschner-from-radyant/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 13:57:48 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[AI SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Podcast]]></category> <category><![CDATA[agentic AI]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ai podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[tech podcasts]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=8300</guid> <description><![CDATA[Niklas Buschner, host of the Masters of Search podcast and CEO of Radyant, joins the Get Discovered podcast.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Most marketing teams still treat AI search as a channel to monitor. But it should be something more than that, says Niklas Buschner, founder and CEO of Radyant.<br><br>Radyant is one of Europe’s leading growth agencies focused on SEO and AI search. He also hosts the <em>Masters of Search</em> podcast, a top SEO podcast where he interviews growth leaders from companies like Wise, Miro, and Eleven Labs. </p> <p>In this episode of the <a href="https://prerender.io/podcast/"><em>Get Discovered</em> podcast</a>, Niklas sat down with host Joe Walsh to talk about the real scale of AI search, why your analytics are badly understating its contribution to pipeline, and what it actually takes to measure discovery when the click doesn’t happen.</p> <p>Watch the full episode below or read on for key takeaways.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Why AI Contributes to Pipeline 15-30x More Than You Think: Niklas Buschner from Radyant" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7gunIOvRn4Y?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">AI Search Is Already at 20% of Google’s Volume </h2> <p>The data point that anchors this conversation comes from a study by Ethan Smith at Graphite (or, you can also <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/ai-is-bigger-than-you-think-ethan-smith-graphite/">tune into his Get Discovered podcast</a> directly). </p> <p>Using SimilarWeb data, Smith <a href="https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-is-much-bigger-than-you-think">compared web traffic to top AI chatbots</a> (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude) against Google’s overall traffic volume. His finding so far? AI search is already pulling roughly 20% of classic search volume.</p> <p>That number will surprise a lot of people, but Niklas isn’t surprised.</p> <p><strong>“A lot of people still perceive AI search as being hype and being niche,” </strong>he says. <strong>“And I think this is just not true.”</strong></p> <p>Google has AI interfaces baked into its own search experience, and cleanly separating “classic Google” from “Google with AI Overviews” in traffic data remains genuinely difficult. But the directional truth is hard to argue. A channel that barely existed three years ago is now operating at significant scale, and it’s only projected to grow.</p> <p><strong>“You have to look at this new reality and accept its significance,”</strong> Niklas says. <strong>“And only then you can really see what still holds and what you have to recalibrate.”</strong></p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> </em><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/industry-study-how-ai-retrieves-content/"><em>Industry Study: What 100M+ Pages Reveal About How AI Chooses Your Content</em></a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Your Analytics Are Understating AI Search Contribution by 15-30x</h2> <p>Even as AI search grows, most measurement systems are capturing almost none of it. But Niklas’s agency has tracked this gap systematically across its entire client portfolio. </p> <p>They compare two data points: click-based attribution (what Google Analytics or HubSpot records as referred traffic from AI platforms) against self-reported attribution (asking leads and customers directly how they found you).</p> <p>The gap is a big one. His data shows that analytics tools understate AI search’s contribution to pipeline by 15 to 30 times.</p> <p>This is structural, he says. For now, AI platforms aren’t incentivized to send users a click. So, the typical user journey looks like this: </p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Open ChatGPT</li> <li>Ask for a tool recommendation </li> <li>Get an answer </li> <li>Close the chat </li> <li>Type the brand name directly into Google</li> </ul> <p>And by the time the user arrives on your site, it registers as branded organic search or branded paid search. The AI channel is completely invisible.</p> <p><strong>“The platforms are not really incentivized for a click-out,”</strong> Niklas explains. <strong>“You end up with a click-based attribution that says paid search. But if you ask people how they found you, they’ll tell you ChatGPT.”</strong></p> <p>As a result, the companies optimizing based on what their analytics say are likely making systematically wrong decisions about where to invest.</p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-get-indexed-on-ai-platforms/">How to Get Indexed on AI Platforms</a></em></p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Why Google Analytics doesn't tell the full AI story: the platforms aren't incentivized for clicks" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvmnFCCWY3I?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Three-Layer Attribution Model That Works</h2> <p>The solution Niklas recommends isn’t another attribution tool. It’s a three-layer measurement system that teams can build themselves:</p> <p><strong>1. Click-based / cookie attribution</strong>. Keep running it. Although it’s incomplete, it still provides a useful baseline.</p> <p><strong>2. Self-reported attribution</strong>. Add a free-text field (not a dropdown) to lead forms and post-purchase surveys. Ask: <em>“How did you hear about us?”</em> and let people write whatever they want. The key here is free text over a dropdown. Dropdowns lock you into the channels you already know about. If a new AI platform emerges, a dropdown won’t catch it. And today’s LLMs can analyze hundreds or thousands of open-text responses in minutes, so the “it’s too hard to analyze” objection no longer holds.</p> <p><strong>3. Sales-reported attribution</strong>. Train your sales team to ask on calls: <em>“Quick question: where did you first hear about us? What were you looking for?”</em> This layer adds topical context that no form can capture. When a prospect tells a sales rep they were searching for a solution to a specific problem, that’s attribution data, a content signal, and a positioning insight all at once.</p> <p>Niklas is clear that this is about the <em>directional</em> <em>truth</em>, not perfect data.</p> <p><strong>“I try to have a way more scrappy and less sophisticated view on that, because I do not see companies making more progress just based on a super sophisticated attribution tool they have bought.”</strong></p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="You have to connect AI search to business outcomes, yet most companies aren't doing this" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vtS57PJpIig?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why the “Traffic Going Up” Heuristic No Longer Works</h2> <p>For years, SEO reporting relied on a simple, convenient signal: if traffic was growing in Google Search Console, SEO was working. A blue line going from the bottom-left to the top-right was easy to show in a board meeting.</p> <p><strong>“That was never the right way to assess the success of SEO based on growing traffic,” </strong>Niklas says. <strong>“But it was very easy to look at. And very convenient.”</strong></p> <p>Attribution has changed. This isn’t because the underlying business questions have changed, but because the easy proxy metric no longer works the way it did. The response shouldn’t be paralysis or a $30K attribution platform. According to Niklas, this should inspire us to return to first principles: what business outcome are you actually trying to drive? First, count the real outcomes and second, understand, directionally, where they’re coming from.</p> <p>For example, companies made advertising decisions for decades before Google Analytics existed. They used market research, asked customers, and tested out marketing methods with no way of precisely attributing them. That same approach, combined with today’s ability to analyze open-text responses at scale, is more than enough to make sound channel investment decisions.</p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/a-podcast-conversation-with-ryan-law-ahrefs/">Why the Golden Era of Content is Over – A Conversation with Ryan Law</a></em></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Biggest Misconception About AI Search Right Now</h2> <p>When asked about the misconceptions he encounters most often, Niklas returns to scale.</p> <p>Many marketing leaders still believe AI search is a fringe channel that inflated during the hype cycle and will settle back to marginal significance. He thinks that belief is costing companies real pipeline.</p> <p>A second misconception is more technical but equally consequential. People ask ChatGPT why it isn’t showing their website, receive an answer they don’t understand, and conclude the whole system is a black box. In fact, Large Language Models still retrieve information from the web. They use indexes, and the content quality, authority signals, and technical foundations that made a site visible in classic search still matter. But now, they’re just filtered through an additional layer of AI reasoning about what’s most relevant to surface.</p> <p><strong>“A lot of stuff that helped with SEO also helps with AI search. But you have to accept the significance of this new reality first.”</strong></p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong></em><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/technical-seo-for-ai-search-peter-rota/"><em> Technical SEO for AI Search</em></a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What the Next 12–18 Months Look Like</h2> <p>When asked what gets worse before it gets better, Niklas points to the job market. Companies feeling pressure to automate will push further and faster than is sustainable, before the reality of where human judgment remains necessary reasserts itself.</p> <p>He recommends checking out Anthropic’s research on the economic impact of AI on the job market. More specifically, a chart showing the theoretical capabilities of AI models versus the extent to which those capabilities are actually in use today. The gap is significant, and it’s not clear it closes as quickly as many assume. More capability doesn’t automatically translate to deployment at scale.</p> <p>On AI search specifically, he’s optimistic about measurement improving and user behavior continuing to shift. The share of discovery happening outside Google won’t shrink. The question is whether marketing teams build the infrastructure to track it before they’re left guessing.</p> <p><strong>“I am 100% convinced that it will get better over time. It’s just a matter of how we use the technology and what we use it for.”</strong></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Takeaways</h2> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>AI search is already at significant scale.</strong> Data from Graphite estimates it’s already pulling roughly 20% of classic Google search volume. </li> <li><strong>Your analytics don’t tell you the full story.</strong> Radyant’s client data shows click-based attribution understates AI search’s contribution to pipeline by 15 to 30 times. </li> <li><strong>Build a three-layer attribution system.</strong> Combine click-based attribution, self-reported attribution (free text, not a dropdown), and sales-reported attribution for a directional picture you can act on.</li> <li><strong>Free text over dropdowns.</strong> A fixed dropdown will miss new AI channels and discovery patterns. Let people tell you how they found you in their own words. </li> <li><strong>SEO fundamentals still apply.</strong> LLMs still rely on search indexes, technical foundations, content quality, and authority signals. </li> </ul> <p><strong>Don’t wait for perfect attribution.</strong> The companies making progress are the ones moving with imperfect data, rather than waiting for a system that will give them certainty.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tune Into the Full Conversation</h2> <p>Listen to the full episode of the <em>Get Discovered</em> podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes with marketing and SEO leaders navigating the AI discovery challenge in real time.</p> <p>To connect with Niklas, visit <a href="https://www.radyant.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Radyant</a> or find him on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/?locale=en">LinkedIn</a>. His podcast, <em><a href="https://www.radyant.io/masters-of-search">Masters of Search</a></em>, is available on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Spotify Embed: Why AI Contributes to Pipeline 15-30x More Than You Think: Niklas Buschner, CEO of Radyant" style="border-radius: 12px" width="100%" height="152" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/0PFen4RvmJiYrmE91I9DyO?si=n81OAUlBQYWWqs06MoYLJQ&utm_source=oembed"></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About Prerender.io</h2> <p>Prerender.io is a leading SEO solution that helps modern websites ensure their JavaScript-heavy pages are fully visible to search engines and AI tools. Trusted by companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Walmart, Prerender is the go-to partner for businesses navigating the future of SEO and AI-driven discoverability. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Start for free today.</a></p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-16018d1d wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" style="border-radius:0px;background-color:#1f8511">Try Prerender.io For Free</a></div> </div> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>How to Index Your Website on Google for the First Time</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-index-your-website-on-google/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:01:44 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Technical SEO]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=8102</guid> <description><![CDATA[Learn how to index a website (for the first time), fix its crawl and rendering issues, and make it visible for AI search, too.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Your new website is live: the domain resolves, the pages load, and the product team signed off. Yet when you search for it, nothing appears because your website needs to be indexed by Google for the first time.</p> <p>After the hard work of launching a site, most teams focus on content or design improvements, not on indexing. Some teams don’t even know how to index a website for the first time, so this process easily slips through the cracks. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it tends to only come up when performance is poor, or content isn’t visible on Google.</p> <p>In this blog, we will speak about the process of getting indexed on a brand-new site. This applies if you’ve migrated frameworks, rolled out a microsite, or replatformed your marketing tech stack.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Google Finds and Indexes a New Website</h2> <p>Before your site can appear in search results, Google processes it in a sequence of five stages.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Discovery</h3> <p>Discovery happens when Google first becomes aware of your URL. This usually happens through:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>External links from other websites.</li> <li>XML sitemaps submitted via Google Search Console.</li> <li>Previously known URLs associated with your domain.</li> <li>Internal links within your site.</li> </ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Crawling</h3> <p>Once discovered, web crawlers (like <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/">Googlebot and OpenAI’s crawlers</a>) request the page. Crawling retrieves the raw HTML and identifies links to other pages. If your site has no inbound links and no submitted sitemap, discovery and crawling may take longer. While crawling is a crucial part of the indexing process, it alone does not guarantee indexing.</p> <p><strong>Crawl budget is another key factor here</strong>. Search engines allocate a finite number of pages they’ll crawl on your site within a given timeframe; once that budget is exhausted, <a href="http://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-renders-javascript-websites" type="link" id="http://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-renders-javascript-websites">Googlebot stops</a>, regardless of how many pages remain unvisited.</p> <p>For JavaScript-heavy sites, this becomes a serious problem: rendering JS takes longer and requires more processing than static HTML, burning through your crawl budget faster and leaving pages undiscovered or deprioritized for indexing. Unrendered pages also <a href="https://prerender.io/framework/react/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/framework/react/">hide internal links</a>, meaning crawlers can’t follow them. <a href="https://prerender.io/benefits/bigger-crawl-budget/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/benefits/bigger-crawl-budget/">Managing your crawl budget</a> so it’s spent on valuable, fully renderable pages is one of the most impactful things you can do for indexation.</p> <p><strong>Read: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/5-ways-to-maximize-crawling-efficiency-for-faster-indexation/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/5-ways-to-maximize-crawling-efficiency-for-faster-indexation/">5 Ways to Maximize Crawling and Get Indexed Faster.</a></strong></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Rendering</h3> <p>After crawling, Google determines what the page is actually about. If your website relies on JavaScript to load content dynamically, Google may need to render the page before it can fully evaluate it. While Google can render JavaScript, it can fail or be incomplete. Rendering allows Google to see the final version of the content, not just the initial HTML response. If key elements only appear after scripts execute, indexing depends on successful rendering. If rendering fails or is incomplete, Google may not see the page the way users do.</p> <p><strong>Related: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/why-javascript-complicates-indexation-and-how-to-fix-it/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/why-javascript-complicates-indexation-and-how-to-fix-it/">Why Does JavaScript Complicate My Indexing Performance?</a></strong></p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Indexing</h3> <p>After crawling and rendering, Google evaluates the page’s content, structure, metadata, and overall quality. If the page meets its indexing criteria, it is added to Google’s index: a massive, distributed database of searchable documents. Only once a page reaches the indexing state can it rank. Essentially, then it will appear on Google SERPs for a particular keyword or topic.</p> <p>If a page is crawled but not indexed, it may appear in Search Console as “Discovered” or “<a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-googles-crawled-currently-not-indexed-coverage-guide/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-googles-crawled-currently-not-indexed-coverage-guide/">Crawled – currently not indexed.</a>” In those cases, Google has seen the URL but has chosen not to store it.</p> <p>In simple terms, every website moves through the same progression:</p> <p><strong>Discovery → Crawling → Rendering → Indexing → Ranking.</strong></p> <p>If your website isn’t showing on Google, something in that progression is breaking. Now let’s walk through the practical steps to make sure your site moves cleanly from discovery to indexing.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Step-by-Step: How to Get Your Website Indexed on Google</h2> <p>If you’re trying to make your website visible on Google for the first time, follow these steps in order.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Step 1: Create and Verify Google Search Console</h3> <p>Register your domain in Google Search Console.</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Add your domain as a property.</li> <li>Verify ownership (via DNS, HTML file upload, or Tag Manager).</li> <li>Confirm that your pages are accessible.</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="401" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-to-create-and-verify-your-domain-in-Google-Search-Console.jpg" alt="How to create and verify your domain in Google Search Console" class="wp-image-8108" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-to-create-and-verify-your-domain-in-Google-Search-Console.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-to-create-and-verify-your-domain-in-Google-Search-Console-300x193.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p>Verification doesn’t automatically index your website, but it gives you visibility into crawl activity, indexing status, and potential technical issues. It also allows you to submit sitemaps and request indexing directly.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Step 2: Submit Your Sitemap</h3> <p>A sitemap is a structured file that lists the URLs you want crawled and indexed.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="219" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Example-of-an-XML-sitemap.jpg" alt="Example of an XML sitemap" class="wp-image-8112" style="width:624px;height:auto" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Example-of-an-XML-sitemap.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Example-of-an-XML-sitemap-300x105.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p>It helps Google:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Discover new pages more quickly.</li> <li>Understand your site’s structure.</li> <li>Identify priority URLs.</li> </ul> <p>To submit your sitemap:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>Locate it (commonly <code><span style="color: #188038;">yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml</span></code>).</li> <li>In Search Console, navigate to <strong>Sitemaps.</strong></li> <li>Paste the URL and click <strong>Submit.</strong></li> </ol> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="353" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-to-submit-an-XML-sitemap.png" alt="How to submit an XML sitemap" class="wp-image-8113" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-to-submit-an-XML-sitemap.png 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/How-to-submit-an-XML-sitemap-300x170.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p>Submitting a sitemap does not guarantee indexing. But it improves discovery, especially for new domains with limited inbound links.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Step 3: Request Indexing for Key Pages</h3> <p>If you’ve just launched and want priority pages indexed quickly (homepage, core product pages, documentation, etc.), use the <strong>URL Inspection</strong> tool in Search Console.</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>Paste the page URL into the search bar.</li> <li>Review the current indexing status.</li> <li>Click <strong>Request Indexing.</strong></li> </ol> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="188" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/URL-unknown-to-Google.png" alt="URL unknown to Google" class="wp-image-8114" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/URL-unknown-to-Google.png 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/URL-unknown-to-Google-300x90.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p>This signals to Google that the page should be re-crawled and evaluated. It’s not immediate, but it’s typically faster than waiting for discovery alone.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Step 4: Check That Your Pages Are Crawlable</h3> <p>If your website is not showing on Google, one of these common blockers may be preventing indexing:</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading">Noindex Tag</h4> <p>If a page includes a <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-google-noindex-rendering/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-google-noindex-rendering/">noindex directive</a>, Google is explicitly instructed not to store it in the index. Remove the tag from live pages you want indexed.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading">Robots.txt Disallow</h4> <p>If your <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-and-seo/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-and-seo/">robots.txt file blocks access</a> to certain paths, Googlebot cannot crawl those pages. Update the rules to allow crawling where appropriate.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading">Password Protection</h4> <p>Search engines cannot access gated or login-protected content. Ensure public pages are accessible.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading">Staging Domain Configuration</h4> <p>If canonical tags or environment settings still point to a staging or development domain, Google may ignore your production URLs. Confirm that your live domain is self-referencing.</p> <h4 class="wp-block-heading">Incorrect Canonical Tags</h4> <p>If a page points to another URL as the canonical version, Google may choose not to index it. Ensure canonical tags reflect the intended primary URL.</p> <p><strong>Related: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/sure-fire-ways-to-get-urls-deindexed-by-google/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/sure-fire-ways-to-get-urls-deindexed-by-google/">12 Reasons Your URLs Get Deindexed by Google and Their Solutions</a></strong></p> <p>If you’ve completed these steps and your site still isn’t appearing in search results, the next question is usually timing.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Long Does Google Take to Index a Site?</h2> <p>Indexing timelines vary depending on your domain history, technical setup, and how easily Google can process your content.</p> <p>As a general guideline:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Brand-new domains:</strong> anywhere from a few days to several weeks.</li> <li><strong>Established, high-authority domains:</strong> often within hours to a few days.</li> <li><strong>JavaScript-heavy or dynamically rendered sites:</strong> unpredictable.</li> </ul> <p>Even if your sitemap is submitted and your pages are crawlable, indexing can still fail at the rendering stage. If that processing step is delayed or incomplete, indexing will slow down.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Technical Layer: What Happens When Google Crawls JavaScript Content</h2> <p>Up to this point, the process sounds straightforward: Google discovers your page, crawls it, and indexes it.</p> <p>But for many websites, there’s an additional step.</p> <p>When Googlebot requests a page, it first receives the raw HTML response from the server. On a static site, that HTML contains the full content (headings, text, links, and metadata), allowing Google to evaluate it immediately. On dynamic sites, however, the initial HTML may be minimal. Visible content is assembled in the browser after JavaScript runs.</p> <p>That means:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>The primary page content may not exist in the initial HTML response.</li> <li>Internal links may only appear after scripts execute.</li> <li>Canonical tags and metadata may be injected dynamically.</li> </ul> <p>In those cases, Google must render the page by executing JavaScript before it can evaluate it properly. Rendering does not always happen immediately after crawling. If scripts are complex, blocked, or error-prone, Google may process the page late, partially, or not at all.</p> <p>From your perspective, the website is live. From Google’s perspective, the page may appear incomplete.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">When JS Rendering Becomes the Indexing Bottleneck</h2> <p>If you’ve verified Search Console, submitted your sitemap, removed crawl blockers, and requested indexing, but pages still don’t appear, the issue is often rendering.</p> <p>For JavaScript-heavy sites, indexing reliability depends on how content is delivered to crawlers. There are three common approaches to solving rendering-related indexing issues:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Client-Side Rendering (CSR)</h3> <p>With client-side rendering, content is generated in the browser after JavaScript executes. This is simple from a development perspective, but search engines must render the page before evaluating it. Indexing may be delayed or inconsistent.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Server-Side Rendering (SSR)</h3> <p>The server generates fully rendered HTML before sending it to the browser. This ensures search engines receive complete content immediately. However, <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-srr-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-srr-and-why-do-you-need-to-know/">implementing SSR</a> often requires architectural changes and ongoing infrastructure management.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Dynamic Rendering</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/when-you-should-consider-dynamic-rendering/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/when-you-should-consider-dynamic-rendering/">Dynamic rendering</a> serves a pre-rendered HTML version of the page specifically to search engine crawlers, while users continue to receive the interactive JavaScript experience. This approach improves crawl reliability without requiring a full front-end rebuild.</p> <p><strong>Read: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/other-rendering-options-vs-prerendering/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/other-rendering-options-vs-prerendering/">Explaining the Difference Between Prerendering and Other Rendering Options</a></strong></p> <p>For teams that rely on modern JavaScript frameworks but want predictable indexing, dynamic rendering with a tool like <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> provides a practical middle ground.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">A Practical Approach to Dynamic Rendering with Prerender.io</h2> <p>Prerender.io implements dynamic rendering at scale. It detects search engine crawlers and serves them a fully rendered HTML snapshot of each page, ensuring Google can crawl and index complete content without relying on client-side execution.</p> <p>This stabilizes indexing for:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>AI-generated or no-code front-end platforms (such as <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-make-lovable-websites-seo-friendly/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-make-lovable-websites-seo-friendly/">Lovable</a>).</li> <li><a href="https://prerender.io/framework/react/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/framework/react/">React</a>, <a href="https://prerender.io/framework/vue-js/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/framework/vue-js/">Vue</a>, <a href="https://prerender.io/framework/angular/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/framework/angular/">Angular</a>, and <a href="https://prerender.io/framework/others-js/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/framework/others-js/">Next.js</a> applications.</li> <li>Headless CMS architectures.</li> <li><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-single-page-applications-spas-for-crawling-and-indexing/\" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-optimize-single-page-applications-spas-for-crawling-and-indexing/\">Single-page applications</a>.</li> <li>Sites undergoing framework migrations.</li> </ul> <p>By delivering complete HTML from the start, rendering becomes predictable and no longer depends on when or how JavaScript executes. For teams launching new properties or replatforming existing ones, this creates a reliable indexing foundation without requiring a full front-end rebuild.</p> <p><strong>Watch the video below to learn how Prerender.io works or <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/pricing/">explore our pricing options</a>.</strong></p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="How Does Prerender.io Work? A Quick Explainer" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OxNt36HhCP4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">FAQs About How to Index Your Website on Google</h2> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. What is the Difference Between Crawling and Indexing?</h3> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Crawling </strong>is when Googlebot discovers and retrieves your page.</li> <li><strong>Indexing </strong>is when Google evaluates and stores that page in its searchable database.</li> </ul> <p>A page can be crawled but not indexed. If you’re comparing crawling vs. indexing to diagnose why your website isn’t showing in Google, indexing is usually where issues appear, especially if rendering fails or quality signals are weak.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Why is My Website Not Showing on Google?</h3> <p>If your site isn’t appearing in search results, the indexing process likely broke at one of these stages:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>The page hasn’t been discovered.</li> <li>It was crawled but not indexed.</li> <li>A noindex tag or robots.txt rule is blocking it.</li> <li>Canonical tags point elsewhere.</li> <li><a href="https://prerender.io/framework/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/framework/">JavaScript rendering</a> failed.</li> </ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. How Much Does Dynamic Rendering Cost?</h3> <p>Dynamic rendering costs vary depending on traffic volume and crawl frequency. Prerender.io uses a <strong>usage-based pricing model</strong> with several plan tiers designed to scale with your site’s needs:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Plans start at <strong>$49 per month</strong> and include a set number of renders per month.</li> <li>Higher tiers (e.g., Growth and Pro) include larger monthly render allowances and more advanced features.</li> <li>Additional renders beyond your plan’s quota are billed at a set rate per 1,000 renders.</li> </ul> <p>A “render” refers to a fully rendered version of a page that Prerender.io stores and serves to crawlers. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/pricing/">Review Prerender.io’s pricing</a> for more information.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. How Can I Get My Website Indexed on Google Faster?</h3> <p>Steps to get your website indexed faster include:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Verifying Google Search Console.</li> <li>Submitting a sitemap.</li> <li>Requesting indexing via URL Inspection.</li> <li>Improving internal linking.</li> <li>Ensuring full content exists in the initial HTML.</li> </ul> <p>If content only appears after JavaScript execution, indexing may be delayed until rendering completes.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Does Indexing Affect AI Search and AEO Visibility?</h3> <p>Yes, indexing affects AI search visibility as it is the foundation for both traditional search rankings and Answer Engine Optimization. AI systems <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/understanding-web-crawlers-traditional-ai/">rely on indexed content</a> as a source layer. If your page is not indexed, it cannot be surfaced in AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s AIO.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>How to Prepare for the Agentic AI Wave: A Conversation with Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of DemandSphere </title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/podcast-ray-grieselhuber-demandsphere/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:58:52 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[AI SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Podcast]]></category> <category><![CDATA[agentic AI]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ai podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[tech podcasts]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=8119</guid> <description><![CDATA[Tune into our conversation with Ray Griselhuber, CEO of DemandSphere and a grounded voice in the AI search space.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>In season two of Get Discovered, we’re documenting what we’re calling the discovery crisis: how AI is changing where online discovery happens, what actually gets surfaced, and why so many marketing teams are realizing they don’t have the visibility or control they thought they did.</p> <p>In this episode, host Joe Walsh sits down with Ray Grieselhuber, founder and CEO of DemandSphere, a platform that gives marketing teams a unified view of their brand across traditional search, Large Language Models, and agentic search experiences. </p> <p>The conversation covers everything from indexing to attribution to how to prepare for agentic AI. Whether you’re a growth leader or SEO expert, you’ll definitely find this one valuable.</p> <p>Listen to the full episode below, or read on for a written summary.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="How to Prepare for the Agentic AI Wave: Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of DemandSphere" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E1YnDQUo5tY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Measurement Contract Is Broken</h2> <p>Ray opens with a framing that shapes the rest of the conversation: the measurement contract between SEO effort and business outcomes has fundamentally broken down.</p> <p>It used to be relatively straightforward, even if it was difficult to clearly attribute revenue from SEO. You’d identify search volume for a topic, create content targeting those keywords, and expect a reasonably predictable number of clicks based on ranking position and clickthrough rates. It was never perfectly deterministic, but it was workable.</p> <p>That model no longer holds for most sites.</p> <p><em>“The big thing is that the measurement from a business perspective, the measurement contract has really gotten broken in many ways… </em><strong><em>You have to bring this mindset that you’re triangulating directional data from a lot of different sources in order to build a picture.”</em></strong></p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Why the measurement contract in SEO is now broken" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/u9aV2tcfctw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p>What Ray describes is less like a dashboard and more like reckoning. Using multiple imprecise signals together to form a directional picture, then treating the whole thing as a feedback loop rather than a formula. That skillset, he argues, is what will help people survive this wave. Those who’ve been doing SEO for years already know how to work this way. For those who are new to it, he admits that this shift can feel disorienting.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Great Decoupling of Clicks and Impressions</h2> <p>One of the most concrete phenomena Ray points to is what’s widely being called “the great decoupling,” a term coined by the well-known SEO expert, <a href="https://www.growth-memo.com/p/the-great-decoupling">Kevin Indig</a>. It refers to the breakdown of the historically tight correlation between impressions (a proxy for search demand), rankings, and traffic. (We also discuss this in our conversations with <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/podcast-noah-greenberg-stacker/">Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker</a>, and <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/podcast-klaus-schremser-otterlyai/">Klaus-M. Schremser, CEO of OtterlyAI</a>.) </p> <p>For a long time, if your content ranked well for high-volume terms, you could count on traffic following. That relationship has weakened significantly. Impressions are up on many sites, but clicks aren’t following at the same rate because AI Overviews, featured snippets, and other zero-click features are absorbing more of the interaction.</p> <p>This creates a new kind of challenge, says Ray. You can no longer look at search volume data and confidently project the engagement you’ll get from capturing that demand. The signal still matters, but it’s less predictive than it once was.</p> <p>However, not every site is experiencing this equally. Ray notes that some of DemandSphere’s customers still show tight correlations. But for most, it’s a genuine source of anxiety and a real planning problem.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Yes, Traditional SEO Still Matters</h2> <p>One of the more grounded parts of this conversation is Ray’s insistence that foundational SEO principles haven’t gone away, a theme we’ve heard from nearly <a href="https://prerender.io/podcast/">every podcast guest</a> this season. They’ve just shifted where they apply.</p> <p>A common misconception in the industry is that SEO is either completely dead (the panicked take) or completely unchanged (the defensive SEO-community take). Ray argues that both of these miss the point.</p> <p>From Ray’s perspective, the reason traditional SEO still matters is largely about the index. Google’s web index remains the most comprehensive map of the internet that exists, and most Large Language Model applications—whether they’re running on Bing’s API or scraping search results more directly—are still drawing on that index for live retrieval.</p> <p><em>“I always talk about the index being the prize, and nobody has a better index of the internet than Google. So that makes them incredibly valuable as a platform company. It also means that a lot of the things that still matter for SEO still matter very much within the realm of what most people would call AI search visibility.”</em></p> <p>The implication for practitioners: the work you’re doing to help search engines find, crawl, and understand your content is also the work that helps LLM applications surface it.</p> <p><em><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-get-indexed-on-ai-platforms/">How to Get Indexed on AI Platforms</a></em></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Training Layer vs. Retrieval Layer</h2> <p>Ray draws a distinction that’s genuinely useful for thinking about LLM visibility: the difference between what a model knows from its training data and what it retrieves in real time.</p> <p>Training data has a cutoff date. The moment a model launches, its knowledge is already aging. This is why tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity have increasingly added live web retrieval—often called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG—to supplement what the model was trained on. When you ask an LLM a question about a current topic, the system often goes to a search index to pull fresh information before generating a response.</p> <p>This means you’re always dealing with a hybrid system. Some of what shapes your visibility in an LLM response is baked in from training, while some of it is determined in the moment by live retrieval from search indexes.</p> <p>For SEO and content strategy, this has real implications. Ranking well and being crawlable still matter for the retrieval layer. But what about training?</p> <p>Ray’s view is that training data visibility is harder to engineer, but it’s also shaped by the same underlying forces that drive search indexing. The internet that training datasets pull from has already been shaped heavily by Google’s index and by the signals that determine what gets crawled and surfaced. Sites like Common Crawl, which are widely used in training datasets, tend to favor established, well-linked, well-indexed domains.</p> <p>“If you’re one of the top brands in the world, then you’re going to probably do pretty well on that. If you’re a smaller brand, your visibility within Common Crawl itself is going to be limited.”</p> <p>Ray’s practical advice: don’t treat training visibility and live retrieval as separate problems. Both reward the same fundamentals of being indexed, authoritative, and well-structured.</p> <p><strong><em>Further Reading: </em></strong><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/ai-optimization-technical-seo-guide/"><em>A Technical Guide to Optimize Your Website for AI Search</em></a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why You Should Think of Your Website as a Knowledge Repository</h2> <p>One of the more conceptually useful ideas in this conversation is Ray’s suggestion to stop thinking about your website as a marketing function and start thinking about it as an interlinked knowledge repository. </p> <p>The mental model he offers is something like an internal Wikipedia or a well-maintained personal knowledge base (think Obsidian, or Zettelkasten-style note systems). The idea is that your content should be structured for knowledge retrieval with clear topic relationships, well-organized internal linking, and content that answers specific questions—rather than optimized purely for marketing purposes.</p> <p>This isn’t a completely new idea in SEO, but the framing becomes more urgent in an LLM context. Models doing retrieval are, in a sense, trying to pull the most relevant and well-organized information on a topic. Sites that are structured to make that easy are better positioned compared to sites that aren’t.</p> <p>Ray connects this to a longer-standing belief at DemandSphere: “Good SEO is good product management and also good corporate strategy.” You can often tell how well-run a company is by how coherent and discoverable its search surface is.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="How you should think about your website now" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4PyDQ87YNUo?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to Think About Agentic AI</h2> <p>One of the more forward-looking threads in this conversation involves how to think about “agents as users of your website.”</p> <p>Joe raises the idea, as it’s something the Prerender.io team has been thinking about internally. He notes that the user class for websites is expanding, and it’s not just humans anymore. Agents are browsing, querying, and making decisions on behalf of users. And as agentic tools become more accessible to non-technical users, the share of traffic and interaction driven by agents is likely to grow.</p> <p>Ray pushes back slightly on the more radical version of this thesis: he’s skeptical that human-facing websites will become irrelevant in a three-to-five-year timeframe. But he’s fully on board with the underlying point: “Yes, you should be thinking about agents as a distinct user class now.”</p> <p><strong>“You should definitely be thinking in terms of new protocols to expose your website’s behavior to agents, because it will be an influencing factor in many ways in that first part of the funnel.”</strong></p> <p>The framing he finds useful is a hybrid model. Agents may handle the early stages of discovery and shortlisting to help users narrow down options before they engage directly. But the closer you get to a real decision (especially one involving money), the more likely a human is to want to be in the loop. The website isn’t going away, of course, but it’s becoming a new layer in a more complex decision stack.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Should you think about agents as a new user class on your website?" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yTpPWBgjDcM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p><em><strong>Further Reading:</strong> <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/">How to Build Agent-Friendly Websites</a></em></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Biggest Misconceptions in AI Search Today</h2> <p>Ray identifies two misconceptions that he sees as a kind of pair.</p> <p>The first is the familiar one: “SEO is dead.” This is the panicked response to AI disruption, and Ray (like most thoughtful practitioners) thinks it’s wrong. The fundamentals of how information is organized and retrieved online haven’t changed as much as the discourse suggests.</p> <p>The second is the defensive mirror image: “it’s all just SEO.” This is the response from the SEO community that’s tempting to make, but equally incomplete. When you say “it’s all just SEO,” you’re focusing on the mechanics of indexes and content at the expense of the more important question: what are users actually doing, and how is that behavior shifting?</p> <p>“If any conversation we’re having about this, if you’re not bringing it back to what users are doing, how is user behavior shifting, then you’re missing the boat.”</p> <p>For Ray, human attention is the prize. The tools for capturing it change faster than the underlying human behaviors do.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What Gets Better in the Next 12–18 Months</h2> <p>On the optimistic side of the ledger, Ray points to something he and Joe both feel: the ability to build things faster is genuinely transformative right now.</p> <p>DemandSphere has fully embraced AI-based engineering, and the distinction Ray makes is worth noting. Vibe coding is fine for what it is. But AI-based engineering goes further: it means having a real deployment pipeline and operational infrastructure behind what you build. With that foundation in place, you can now build and ship things at a speed that wasn’t previously possible for a team of any size.</p> <p>He also reframes the “SaaS apocalypse” narrative in a useful way. Yes, some software companies are going to struggle or disappear, and especially those that are little more than a UI wrapper around a database. But the silver lining is that this clears away a layer of subscription overhead that was never delivering enough value to justify its cost. The companies that survive and thrive will be the ones that have found a way to function less like a product you log into and more like a service that’s genuinely part of your team’s workflow. We’re curious to see where this takes us.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tune Into the Full Conversation</h2> <p>Listen to the full episode of the <em>Get Discovered</em> podcast on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/0rzmrAPI063Y0LYpHipII8">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/get-discovered-by-prerender-io/id1840604392">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@Prerender">YouTube</a>, or wherever you get your podcasts. To connect with Ray, visit <a href="https://www.demandsphere.com/">DemandSphere</a> or find him on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/raygrieselhuber/">LinkedIn</a>.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About Prerender.io</h2> <p>Prerender.io is a leading SEO solution that helps modern websites ensure their JavaScript-heavy pages are fully visible to search engines and AI tools. Trusted by companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Walmart, Prerender is the go-to partner for businesses navigating the future of SEO and AI-driven discoverability. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Start for free today.</a></p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-16018d1d wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" style="border-radius:0px;background-color:#1f8511">Try Prerender.io For Free</a></div> </div> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Why SSR Alone Doesn’t Solve Enterprise SEO Problems</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/ssr-enterprise-seo/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender Team]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:09:38 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=8039</guid> <description><![CDATA[Discover why enterprise SEO still breaks after SSR adoption, and how to fix it with scalable JS rendering.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Implementing SSR for enterprise SEO fixes many of the visibility issues caused by JavaScript, which is why it’s often treated as the go-to solution for large-scale websites. But rendering content on the server is only one piece of the puzzle, especially if your goal is to improve both search and AI discovery.</p> <p>The limitations of SSR usually show up after deployment. As Googlebot scales its crawling, your origin server (now responsible for rendering every request in real time) starts to introduce latency. That slowdown becomes a signal: crawl rates drop, and pages that are technically correct get indexed less frequently, or not at all. At the same time, cache invalidation delays can prevent updated content from reaching Googlebot for hours or even days.</p> <p>None of this means SSR was the wrong approach. It means it solves a specific problem, while enterprise SEO challenges extend beyond rendering. This article covers where those gaps appear, what causes them at the infrastructure level, and how dynamic rendering fills them without requiring changes to your SSR architecture.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">TL;DR – Why Enterprise SEO Can Still Break After SSR</h2> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>SSR fixes how your JavaScript pages are rendered, but it doesn’t fix how reliably crawlers find, index, and return to them at scale.</li> <li>The bigger your site, the more crawler traffic competes with real user traffic — and the more your server overhead affects how often Googlebot shows up.</li> <li>When content changes faster than your cache refreshes, Googlebot sees outdated pages. That’s a freshness problem, not a rendering problem.</li> <li>Enterprise sites are rarely built on one uniform tech stack. Rendering inconsistencies on pages outside your core SSR setup are more common than most teams expect.</li> <li>Not all AI crawlers execute JavaScript. Missing HTML content on any page is content that does not surface in AI-generated answers.</li> <li>Dynamic rendering handles what crawlers see at the infrastructure level, independently of your SSR setup, without touching your application.</li> </ul> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What SSR Fixes for Enterprise Sites (And the Visibility Gaps It Leaves Behind)</h2> <p>To understand where SSR falls short, it helps to be precise about what it actually does.</p> <p>SSR executes JavaScript on the server and delivers fully rendered HTML to the client on the initial HTTP response. The browser receives a complete document it can parse and display immediately, rather than a near-empty HTML shell that JavaScript then populates after load.</p> <p>Before SSR, client-side rendering (CSR) was the default for JavaScript-heavy applications. Googlebot would arrive at a page, receive a shell with a single <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><div id="root"></code></mark></code> and a JavaScript bundle, and index whatever it found. For dynamic content loaded after JavaScript execution, that was often nothing.</p> <p>Googlebot does execute JavaScript, but through a secondary rendering queue that can lag behind the initial crawl by days or weeks. <a href="https://www.onely.com/blog/google-needs-9x-more-time-to-crawl-js-than-html/" type="link" id="https://www.onely.com/blog/google-needs-9x-more-time-to-crawl-js-than-html/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Research by Onely</a> found that <strong>Google needs 9x more time to crawl JavaScript pages than plain HTML</strong>, a direct consequence of this rendering queue. This means that content that only exists after JavaScript rendering may not be indexed promptly, or at all (if Googlebot deprioritizes re-rendering).</p> <p>SSR eliminates that lag. The rendered HTML is the initial response, and it behaves like a static document from the moment Googlebot arrives. For most dynamic sites, that fix is sufficient, but enterprise sites are on another level. At enterprise scale, SSR’s core assumptions break down in ways that often have nothing to do with rendering quality.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Where Enterprise Websites Break SSR’s Rendering Benefits</h2> <p>SSR was designed for manageable page counts, moderate content change frequency, and an infrastructure that can absorb rendering load. Enterprise sites systematically violate all three. The result is three compounding failure modes.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Origin Server Overhead for SSR</h3> <p>Every SSR request requires your origin server to render the page in real time. Under normal user traffic, this is manageable with cache-rendered output, set TTLs, and horizontal scaling. Search crawler traffic behavior breaks this model.</p> <p>Googlebot crawls aggressively, ignores your traffic patterns, and can hit a large site hundreds of times per hour. Many of those requests land on uncached pages, each one triggering a full render cycle alongside your user traffic.</p> <p>This creates two problems. First, your server slows down. Second, Googlebot notices. When response times degrade, Googlebot interprets that as a signal to back off and reduces its crawl rate. <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9679690" type="link" id="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9679690" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google’s own documentation confirms this directly</a>: if server response times are consistently slow, the crawl rate limit decreases to avoid overloading the server.</p> <p>In documented cases, such as <a href="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googlebot-crawl-slump-mueller-points-to-server-errors/553715/" type="link" id="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googlebot-crawl-slump-mueller-points-to-server-errors/553715/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">one reported by Search Engine Journal</a>, server-side errors have caused <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1mnr03b/comment/n8n5eki/" type="link" id="https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1mnr03b/comment/n8n5eki/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">crawl rates to drop by 90% within 24 hours</a> (see this Reddit post, for instance). Pages that would have rendered correctly never get indexed, not because of a rendering bug, but because the crawler stopped before reaching them.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="419" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Dropped-Googlebot-crawl-Reddit.jpg" alt="Dropped Googlebot crawl - Reddit" class="wp-image-8045" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Dropped-Googlebot-crawl-Reddit.jpg 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Dropped-Googlebot-crawl-Reddit-300x201.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p>You’re then stuck choosing between two bad options: throttle Googlebot to protect performance, or over-provision your website’s infrastructure specifically to absorb crawler load. Neither fixes why crawler traffic competes with user traffic in the first place.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Cache Invalidation Lag: Why Googlebot and AI Crawlers See Stale Content</h3> <p>The practical response to SSR rendering overhead is caching: render each page once, store the output, and serve it for subsequent requests. The <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/caching-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-how-prerender-caches/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/caching-what-it-is-how-it-works-and-how-prerender-caches/">caching problem in JavaScript</a> surfaces when content changes.</p> <p>Enterprise sites have dozens of content types sitting behind multiple caching layers in sequence: application cache, CDN edge, and reverse proxy. A content update has to invalidate all of them correctly.</p> <p>For a single page edit, this is manageable. For a bulk catalog update that touches hundreds of thousands of URLs, it frequently isn’t. The database updates, but stale HTML persists at the CDN or reverse proxy because the invalidation signal did not fully propagate, or because a bulk update triggered partial invalidation that missed a subset of affected URLs.</p> <p>Essentially, Googlebot crawls those pages and receives the old content. From its perspective, nothing changed. But for ecommerce, the gap between a pricing or availability update and Googlebot seeing it is a direct revenue problem. For news and media, where freshness influences rankings, cache staleness degrades indexation quality in ways that surface in traffic.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Rendering Inconsistencies Across Page Types</h3> <p>Enterprise sites are rarely architecturally uniform. A large ecommerce site might have category pages in a React SSR setup, product pages on a different system with partial SSR coverage, editorial content on WordPress with a JavaScript frontend, and the localized versions of all of the above built by regional teams with different framework choices.</p> <p>Pages outside the core SSR configuration fall back to client-side rendering. This affects more page types than most teams expect:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Legacy pages never converted during the SSR migration</li> <li>Third-party embedded content where the vendor controls rendering</li> <li>Localized pages built by teams with different technical standards</li> <li>Campaign and landing pages built outside the main application</li> <li>Faceted navigation and filtered listing pages, where dynamic URLs create rendering edge cases</li> </ul> <p>SSR coverage of 80% of page types does not solve 80% of the rendering problem. The pages that fall back to client-side rendering often represent a disproportionate share of strategically important content: high-intent landing pages, localized product catalogs, and faceted search results.</p> <p>These three enterprise SEO SSR failure modes compound each other. But even on pages where SSR is working perfectly, there is a separate problem: <strong>the distinction between a page rendering correctly and a page actually getting indexed.</strong></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why Your Pages Are Still Not Indexed After SSR Implementation</h2> <p>SSR ensures a page renders correctly when a crawler requests it. It does not ensure that Googlebot reaches the page, requests it at a useful frequency, or receives current content when it does. Rendering, crawling, and indexation are distinct processes.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Crawl Budget: The Allocation Problem</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/">Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on a given site within a given period.</a> Google allocates it based on historical crawl rate, server response times, content freshness, and signals about how valuable the site’s content is. A five-million-URL site will not have all five million pages crawled daily, because Googlebot prioritizes, and your infrastructure influences that prioritization with every request.</p> <p><strong>Top tip:</strong> follow <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/crawl-budget-seo/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/blog/crawl-budget-seo/">these tips to optimize your site for better crawl budget spend</a>.</p> <p>Of all the infrastructure signals Google weighs, server response latency is the most punishing, as it directly degrades crawl budget. When SSR rendering overhead slows your origin server’s response, Googlebot observes that latency and reduces its crawl rate. Fewer pages get crawled per budget cycle.</p> <p>Cache staleness compounds this. When Googlebot re-crawls a page and finds the same content it previously saw, it may reduce the page’s crawl frequency and reallocate budget elsewhere. The pages at the bottom of Googlebot’s priority list tend to be the ones that most need fresh indexation: long-tail product pages, localized variants, filtered category pages, and newly created content. These are also where ecommerce and publishing revenue are concentrated.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Content Freshness Problem: Why SSR SEO Doesn’t Solve it</h3> <p>For frequently updated sites, the gap between a content update and Googlebot seeing it is a measurable SEO problem. In ecommerce, product pages showing outdated pricing or availability send poor quality signals to Googlebot, and pages that consistently show stale information can lose rankings relative to competitors with stronger freshness signals. In news and media, freshness is a direct ranking factor. Stories indexed promptly after publication rank better for time-sensitive queries than stories where indexation lags by hours.</p> <p>SSR alone does not close the freshness gap if cache invalidation is unreliable. A page may render correctly on the next crawl, but if that crawl happens three days after the update, the freshness advantage is already gone.</p> <p>Cache staleness and crawl budget are problems Googlebot can at least partially recover from over time. The indexation gaps affecting AI crawlers are permanent and growing in business impact as AI search becomes a primary discovery channel.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">SSR for AI Visibility: Solving the LLM Content Extraction Gap</h2> <p>Enterprise SEO has historically centered on Googlebot. The current landscape is different, and the numbers are moving fast.</p> <p>According to <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/" type="link" id="https://blog.cloudflare.com/from-googlebot-to-gptbot-whos-crawling-your-site-in-2025/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review</a>, AI bots now account for <a href="https://ppc.land/ai-crawlers-now-consume-4-2-of-web-traffic-as-internet-grows-19-in-2025/" type="link" id="https://ppc.land/ai-crawlers-now-consume-4-2-of-web-traffic-as-internet-grows-19-in-2025/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">4.2% of all HTML requests</a> across the web. GPTBot alone grew 305% in request volume between May 2024 and May 2025. Overall, AI and search crawler traffic grew 18% year-over-year. These crawlers are actively indexing your site right now, and most of them cannot execute JavaScript.</p> <p>AI-powered search products from OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Anthropic, and others now index and cite web content directly in generated answers. The crawlers behind these systems have fundamentally different technical characteristics than Googlebot, and SSR compatibility with them is not guaranteed.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Most AI Crawlers Cannot See Your JavaScript Content</h3> <p>Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, and this detail is critical for SSR.</p> <p>When Googlebot visits your site, it makes two passes: an initial crawl of the HTML response, then a secondary rendering pass where it executes JavaScript and indexes the resulting DOM. AI crawlers make one request. They send an HTTP GET request, receive the HTML response, extract the content, and move on. No secondary rendering pass, no JavaScript execution, no return visit.</p> <p>What is in the initial HTML response is what gets extracted. What is not in the initial HTML response is invisible.</p> <p>On pages where SSR is consistently implemented and delivers complete HTML in the initial response, AI crawlers see complete content. On pages where SSR is missing or inconsistent, they see whatever partial content the HTML shell contains, which may be very little.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">LLM Content Extraction and Structured Data</h3> <p>LLM content extraction depends on clean, complete, well-structured HTML. This matters most for structured content: product specifications, pricing, ingredients, technical specifications, dates, and authorship.</p> <p>If a product page delivers an empty <code><mark style="background-color:#282a36" class="has-inline-color has-white-color"><code><div class="product-specs"></code></mark></code> in the initial HTML and JavaScript populates that div after load, an AI crawler extracts a page with no product specifications. That product does not surface in AI answers for specification-related queries. A competitor whose specifications are present in the initial HTML does.</p> <p>The same applies to schema.org markup in JSON-LD. If your structured data is injected by JavaScript rather than present in the server-delivered HTML, AI crawlers miss it entirely. This affects citation quality and contextual relevance in AI-generated answers, not just traditional rich results in Google Search.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Rendering Inconsistencies Hit AI Crawlers Harder</h3> <p>The rendering inconsistencies described above have more severe consequences for AI crawler compatibility than for Googlebot compatibility.</p> <p>Googlebot has a secondary rendering queue. The process is slow and imperfect, but partial recovery from rendering failures is possible. AI crawlers have no equivalent. A single request returns incomplete HTML, available content is extracted, and the page is not revisited. So rendering inconsistencies that Googlebot eventually works through are ones that AI crawlers never compensate for.</p> <p>For enterprise sites with inconsistent SSR coverage across different tech stacks, teams, and markets, AI crawlers are building their understanding of your site from whatever incomplete HTML the first request returned. There is no correction pass.</p> <p>The question is not whether SSR creates a visibility gap. It does. The question is what infrastructure layer can close it without requiring your teams to rebuild their SSR setup.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Prerender.io vs. Server Side Rendering (SSR)</h2> <p>The Prerender.io vs. SSR debate is often framed as a choice between competing approaches, but they operate at different layers, solve different problems, and are designed to work together.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Dynamic Rendering vs. Server-Side Rendering: What Each Approach Does</h3> <p>SSR is an application architecture decision made at the framework level. It determines how your application generates and delivers HTML, with downstream effects on Time to First Byte, client-side hydration, framework compatibility, developer experience, and infrastructure choices.</p> <p>Prerender.io handles SEO rendering at the edge, intercepting requests by user agent and serving pre-rendered static HTML to crawlers before they reach your application’s pipeline. Human visitors continue through your normal application and receive the full dynamic experience. Crawlers receive complete HTML directly from Prerender’s cache.</p> <p>The two coexist without conflict because they handle different parts of the same request flow. SSR owns the user experience layer. Prerender.io owns what crawlers see. Neither changes what the other does.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How Prerender.io Closes the Enterprise SEO Gaps</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Prerender.io</a> addresses the specific failure modes that make SSR for enterprise SEO more complicated than a standard implementation.</p> <p>Origin server overhead is eliminated for crawler traffic. Prerender.io serves pre-rendered pages from a CDN layer at an average of <strong>0.03 seconds per request</strong>, so Googlebot and AI crawlers receive responses without triggering rendering cycles on your origin servers. The performance comparison to the SSR origin rendering is not marginal.</p> <p>Because responses come from Prerender’s cache rather than your application, cache freshness is also managed independently of your application stack. You can configure refresh intervals per URL pattern and trigger invalidation on content updates, without depending on your application’s cache invalidation working correctly across every layer. <a href="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/cache-expiration" type="link" id="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/cache-expiration">Learn more about cache management in Prerender.io.</a></p> <p>Rendering consistency follows from the same architectural separation. Prerender.io operates at the HTTP request layer, not the application layer, so pages that fall back to client-side rendering receive complete HTML for crawlers regardless of whether they were built in React, Next.js, Vue, a legacy CMS, or a third-party platform.</p> <p><strong>This is what makes Prerender.io a scalable JS rendering solution: coverage expands with your site without requiring framework-level changes.</strong></p> <p>That consistency is what makes AI crawler compatibility structural rather than incidental. <a href="https://prerender.io/ai-search/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/ai-search/">Prerender serves complete pre-rendered HTML from the initial response, so AI crawlers receive complete content regardless of how the page was built.</a> Structured data, product specifications, prices, and any other JavaScript-populated content are present in the HTML they extract.</p> <p>All of this compounds into crawl budget gains. Faster response times from Prerender.io’s CDN-served pages mean Googlebot observes better server performance across the board, which correlates directly with higher crawl budget allocation.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">How Prerender.io Helps Enterprise Websites Win the Google and AI Search</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/popken-fashion-group/">Popken Fashion Group</a>, a retailer running over 30 domains, saw approximately 15,000 additional pages indexed in a single market after reactivating Prerender.io following a brief outage. When the tool was turned off due to an internal technical issue, rankings dropped across markets almost immediately. When it was re-enabled, rankings recovered within a week. Prerender.io was not a supplementary tool in that scenario; it was load-bearing infrastructure.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="291" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Ulla-Popken-increased-the-indexing-rate-after-Prerender.io-adoption.png" alt="Ulla Popken increased the indexing rate after Prerender.io adoption" class="wp-image-8048" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Ulla-Popken-increased-the-indexing-rate-after-Prerender.io-adoption.png 624w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/Ulla-Popken-increased-the-indexing-rate-after-Prerender.io-adoption-300x140.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 624px) 100vw, 624px" /></figure> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/improved-pagespeed-and-boosting-page-indexing-to-optimize-webshop/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/improved-pagespeed-and-boosting-page-indexing-to-optimize-webshop/">Haarshop</a>, with 35,000+ products across Dutch and German domains, went from struggling to surface products in SERPs to indexing 10,000 pages per day after implementation, with organic traffic improving by over 50%. <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/" type="link" id="https://prerender.io/resources/case-studies/">Eldorado</a> saw an 80% traffic improvement after fixing SPA rendering issues through Prerender.</p> <p>These results reflect a consistent pattern: the indexation gap between what a site publishes and what crawlers can see is a revenue gap. Closing that gap does not require rebuilding your SSR architecture. It requires infrastructure that operates at the crawler layer.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Scalable JS Rendering: Why In-House SSR Fails at Enterprise Scale</h2> <p>The “Prerender.io vs. SSR” debate is often framed as a choice between two ways to do the same thing. Technically, that’s true: both deliver rendered HTML to a crawler. But the <strong>architectural cost</strong> of those two paths couldn’t be more different.</p> <p>SSR is an application-level burden. It requires your developers to manage Node.js environments, handle complex hydration logic, and constantly patch rendering bugs as your frontend evolves. Prerender.io moves that entire responsibility to the infrastructure layer.</p> <p>If you are currently running an in-house SSR setup and still seeing indexation gaps, your SSR isn’t “failing”—it’s simply being asked to do something it wasn’t built for: <strong>managing massive crawler volume.</strong></p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>In-House SSR is Fragile:</strong> Every code change in your React or Next.js app risks breaking your SSR output. If a component fails to hydrate correctly on the server, Googlebot sees a broken page.</li> <li><strong>In-House SSR is Expensive:</strong> Scaling an origin server to handle millions of uncached requests from Googlebot and a dozen different AI crawlers requires massive over-provisioning of resources.</li> <li><strong>Prerender.io is Decoupled:</strong> Because Prerender handles rendering at the edge (the HTTP request layer), it doesn’t care how your application is built. It intercepts the crawler, renders the page in a dedicated headless browser, and serves a perfect HTML snapshot.</li> </ul> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Before You Move From SSR to Prerender.io – An Enterprise Checklist</h2> <p>If you’re ready to offload your SEO rendering from your internal team to a managed solution, follow these steps:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Identify “SSR-Light” Areas:</strong> Audit your site for page types (like faceted search or legacy landing pages) where your in-house SSR coverage is spotty. These are your first wins.</li> <li><strong>Audit AI Crawler Access:</strong> Verify that your current setup is delivering 100% of your structured data and product specs in the initial HTML. If it isn’t, AI search engines aren’t seeing you.</li> <li><strong>Update Your Middleware:</strong> Prerender.io integrates at the CDN or Middleware layer. This means you can “turn it on” for specific user agents (Googlebot, GPTBot) while keeping your current setup for humans.</li> <li><strong>Monitor Your Crawl Stats:</strong> Within 72 hours of shifting your crawler traffic to Prerender.io, check Google Search Console. You should see a sharp drop in “Average Response Time” and a corresponding lift in “Total Crawl Requests.”</li> </ol> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Fix Your Enterprise SEO Discovery Issues with Prerender.io</h2> <p>SSR SEO coverage solves the rendering problem it was designed to solve. The gaps covered in this article, origin server strain, cache invalidation failures, rendering inconsistencies across page types, and AI crawler invisibility, are infrastructure problems that live at a different layer. They do not go away by improving your SSR implementation. They go away by adding the right infrastructure alongside it.</p> <p>Every day these gaps persist is a day Googlebot is crawling fewer pages than it should, AI crawlers are building an incomplete picture of your site, and content you have published is not reaching the audiences searching for it.</p> <p>Prerender.io takes a few hours to install, integrates with any JavaScript framework and most CDN and backend configurations, and starts serving complete HTML to crawlers immediately. There is no code rewrite, no SSR migration, and no ongoing maintenance burden after setup.</p> <p>The indexation gap between what your site publishes and what crawlers can see is a revenue gap. <a href="https://prerender.io" type="link" id="https://prerender.io">Start your free trial at Prerender.io</a> today and close it.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">FAQs – Adopting SSR to Fix Enterprise SEO Problems</h2> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Are My Pages Not Being Indexed Even With SSR?</h3> <p>Pages may not be indexed even with SSR because server latency reduces Googlebot’s crawl rate, cache invalidation delays lead to stale content, or certain page types still have rendering inconsistencies.</p> <p>Check response times under crawler load, confirm cache updates propagate correctly, and audit whether all pages return complete HTML on the initial response.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why Can’t AI See My JavaScript Content?</h3> <p>AI can’t see your JavaScript content because AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript—they only extract what’s available in the initial HTML response. Any content rendered client-side, like product details, pricing, or structured data, simply isn’t visible to them.</p> <p>The fix is to ensure all critical content is included in the server-delivered HTML on the first request. Solutions like Prerender.io handle this by serving fully pre-rendered HTML to AI crawlers without requiring changes to your existing architecture.</p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>From Discoverability to Actionability: A Conversation with Tobias Schlottke, CTO and Partner at saas.group</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/a-conversation-with-tobias-schlottke-saas-group/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:34:30 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Podcast]]></category> <category><![CDATA[ai podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo podcasts]]></category> <category><![CDATA[tech podcasts]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=7843</guid> <description><![CDATA[Tune into our conversation with Tobias Schlottke, a driving force in the European tech scene.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Most conversations about AI stop at the same place: “How do we get found in AI search?” But that’s the wrong question, says Tobias Schlottke.</p> <p>In this episode of the Get Discovered podcast, Joe Walsh sat down with Tobias (or Tobi, as he likes to be called), a driving force in the European tech scene. </p> <p>Not only is he Cofounder, Partner, and CTO at saas.group, a key European software portfolio company with 25+ brands and $100M+ ARR, Tobi also cofounded the popular tech conference OMR and runs Alphalist, a well-known podcast for CTOs. </p> <p>In this conversation, Tobi uses his expertise to explore what comes after discoverability: actionability. That’s where the future of SaaS lies, he says, but most businesses aren’t talking about it enough.</p> <p>Watch the full episode below, or read on for key takeaways.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="From Discoverability to Actionability: Tobias Schlottke, Cofounder, Partner, and CTO at saas.group" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1wo_bvMdBuY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why You Don’t Always Need to Read the News</h2> <p>Tobi kicks off the conversation with a surprising confession. Despite being an avid tech leader, he actively avoids tech news more than you think. This isn’t because he’s disengaged, but because most of it doesn’t <em>actually</em> move the needle for him.</p> <p>“There’s always a model released. There’s always a funding round. And often it doesn’t lead to anything. It doesn’t help me with anything.”</p> <p>The real challenge right now, he argues, isn’t production like we see with the news. Instead, it’s adoption. The pace at which AI companies release new capabilities has far outstripped the pace at which businesses can meaningfully act on them, and the value that AI companies are offering with each release is actually quite low, he says.</p> <p>So how does he decide what to pay attention to? He tests things in his personal life first. If he finds himself genuinely using something and generating real value from it, that’s when it earns a place in his professional toolkit. He also leans on his Alphalist CTO network as a filter. If the people he trusts are doing something, he tries it himself. </p> <p>This is reassuring news for anyone in tech. If you find yourself drowning in updates and LinkedIn hype, Tobi reminds us to slow down, trust your own experience, and lean into your network. </p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Why you don't always need to read tech news" width="540" height="960" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ja54HGqsglE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Has Discovery Changed? Humans Are Now the Last Step, Not the First</h2> <p>Tobi then explores how the discovery process has fundamentally changed. He rarely engages with anything cold anymore. By the time he decides to look into a product, a service, or a piece of software, an AI system has already done the preliminary filtering. It has narrowed the relevant options, surfaced the key features, and reduced a broad field of possibilities to one or two candidates. The human decision, and often the transaction itself, comes at the end of that process, not the beginning.</p> <p><strong>“It’s more the discovery process upfront where I see value in systems filtering for me.”</strong></p> <p>He reiterates that the discovery layer <strong><em>first</em></strong> is important. It’s a profound shift for anyone thinking about how their content or product gets found. The audience you’re optimizing for isn’t just the person who eventually engages with your brand. It’s the AI layer that decides whether to surface you at all, a theme we explore in our <a href="http://prerender.io/blog/podcast-klaus-schremser-otterlyai/">episode with OtterlyAI.</a> Actionability is just what comes next.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Importance of Trusted Sources</h2> <p>That’s where trusted sources come in, a recurring theme this season. </p> <p>Trusted sources are now the building blocks of search: both for AI systems first, and human verification second. </p> <p>On a personal level, when he’s evaluating software, he doesn’t just ask an LLM for a recommendation in isolation. He cross-references with his CTO peer network or looks for recommendations from people whose judgment he has direct experience with. He, refreshingly, doesn’t exclusively rely on AI output.</p> <p>But it also matters because it maps to how LLMs themselves are trained and weighted. A <a href="http://prerender.io/blog/podcast-noah-greenberg-stacker/">citation from an authoritative, trusted source carries more signal</a> than a brand citing itself. The analogy Joe raises—a car review in a magazine versus the car manufacturer’s own website—holds up. Independent, credible sources create the kind of signal that actually gets incorporated into AI responses.</p> <p>For businesses, your own website isn’t enough. You need to be present in the sources that AI systems learn from and cite, such as industry publications, peer review platforms, expert communities, and third-party directories. </p> <p>Tobi points specifically to platforms like OMR Reviews (a G2 software equivalent for Europe) as examples of the kind of trusted aggregators that LLMs increasingly draw from. Being present, reviewed, and referenced in those places is becoming as important as having a well-structured website.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Discoverability First. Actionability Second</h2> <p>Most of the industry conversation right now is focused on the first part of the problem: how to get AI to find you, reference, and cite you. That’s a real and urgent problem. But Tobi argues that it’s also just the foundation.</p> <p>The more important question is whether, once you’re found, <strong>you can actually be </strong><strong><em>acted upon</em></strong><strong>.</strong> Can an AI agent complete a transaction? Get a relevant, up-to-date answer? Trigger a workflow? If your content or product can be discovered but not acted on, you’ve only solved half the problem.</p> <p>He draws a direct parallel to the evolution of traditional SaaS: companies would buy dashboards and analytics tools, generate reports, and then never actually change their behavior based on them. The data was there, but the bridge to action was missing.</p> <p>Tobi predicts that the real value of software in the coming years won’t be measured by the data it shows you, but by the actions it takes on your behalf.</p> <p>“The actions that a system is going to take for you will help clients to really generate the real value of software that they may have never materialized before.” </p> <p>For businesses thinking about AI readiness, this reframes the question. Being discoverable to AI is a must-have. But being <em>actionable</em> (having the right structure, APIs, and context for AI agents to do something useful with what they find) is where the competitive advantage starts to separate.</p> <p><strong><em>Further Reading: <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-build-ai-agent-friendly-websites/">How to Build AI Agent-Friendly Websites</a></em></strong></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How Nobody’s Talking About Prompt Injection </h2> <p>In a candid aside, Tobi shares an experience that’s equal parts funny and concerning: his Claude-based automation responded to an incoming WhatsApp message on his behalf, without being asked to.</p> <p>The underlying issue is prompt injection: the risk that an external actor can embed instructions into content that an AI system reads, causing it to behave in unintended ways. The AI doesn’t distinguish between “content to summarize” and “instruction to follow.” For AI systems, both look the same.</p> <p>Tobi’s take is that most people haven’t encountered this problem yet, but they will soon. As AI agents become more embedded in business workflows, such as reading emails, processing documents, or acting on information from external sources, the surface area for prompt injection attacks grows significantly.</p> <p><strong>“This is a topic that many people don’t talk about, and how dangerous it is.”</strong></p> <p>It’s worth flagging for marketers and growth teams, not because it’s their job to solve it, but because it’s coming. The content your brand publishes and the way your data is structured will all matter in an agentic world. Not just for discoverability, but for actionability, too.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Looking Ahead</h2> <p>In the next 12 to 18 months, Tobi is clear about what’s coming.</p> <p>First, the volume of AI-generated software is going to explode. He’s already seeing it himself. People in his orbit are shipping tools they built overnight, which is adding to a landscape that’s already hard to navigate. He also flags the likelihood of more security incidents as agentic systems proliferate faster than the infrastructure to safely govern them.</p> <p>But it’s important to add that he’s not pessimistic. The same forces creating the noise problem are creating the tools to solve it. AI will increasingly help manage the volume it creates, organizing communication, filtering signals, and reducing the cognitive load of staying current. </p> <p>His advice? Stay curious, stay experimental, and don’t let the negativity that dominates the news cycle distort your view of what’s actually happening on the ground.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Takeaways</h2> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>The first discovery layer is increasingly AI-driven, not human-driven.</strong> Optimize for the pre-filtering stage, not just the final visit. By the time a human engages with your brand, AI has already done most of the evaluation.</li> <li><strong>Trusted third-party sources matter more than your own website.</strong> AI systems learn from and cite authoritative external sources, but humans rely on these too. Being present in those places is foundational for AI discovery and human validation.</li> <li><strong>Discoverability is a prerequisite. Actionability is the competitive edge.</strong> The businesses that win will be ready for AI agents to do something with what they find.</li> <li><strong>Prompt injection is a coming risk most teams aren’t prepared for.</strong> As AI agents read and act on external content, the structure and integrity of that content matter for security, not just SEO.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Adoption is the real challenge.</strong> Don’t let the pace of AI releases convince you to chase every new tool. Build a trusted filter (personal experimentation, peer networks) and act on what actually delivers value.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tune Into the Full Conversation</h2> <p>Listen to the full episode of the <em>Get Discovered</em> podcast on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/0rzmrAPI063Y0LYpHipII8">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/get-discovered-by-prerender-io/id1840604392">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@Prerender">YouTube</a>, or wherever you get your podcasts. To connect with Tobi, learn more about <a href="https://saas.group/">saas.group</a> or find him on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-schlottke/">LinkedIn</a>. </p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="Spotify Embed: From Discoverability to Actionability: Tobias Schlottke, Cofounder, Partner, and CTO at saas.group" style="border-radius: 12px" width="100%" height="152" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/60xrlxncT6ITZJ2UM4L5OX?si=RkCPPBKIQ6GWv2-JvzxfRA&utm_source=oembed"></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">About Prerender.io</h2> <p>Prerender.io is a leading SEO solution that helps modern websites ensure their JavaScript-heavy pages are fully visible to search engines and AI tools. Trusted by companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Walmart, Prerender is the go-to partner for businesses navigating the future of SEO and AI-driven discoverability. <a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Start for free today.</a></p> <div class="wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-16018d1d wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex"> <div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://prerender.io/pricing/" style="border-radius:0px;background-color:#1f8511">Try Prerender.io For Free</a></div> </div> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> </item> </channel> </rss>