How do I fix a page that is blank without JavaScript for AI crawlers?

Agents affected

How to tell you have this problem

• •Our scanner reports "Raw HTML has almost no visible text" (check empty_raw_html, critical) or "Most content only appears after JavaScript runs" (content_only_in_js, critical).
• •View-source on your page shows a nearly empty <div id="root"></div> or <div id="app"></div>.
• •The scan shows a large gap between bot-view text length and browser-view text length.

How to fix it

1. 1

   See exactly what AI bots see — the raw HTML with tags stripped. If this prints almost nothing, bots get nothing:

   curl -s https://yoursite.com/ | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr -s '[:space:]' ' ' | head -c 400

2. 2

   Best fix: move to a framework that server-renders by default. Next.js (App Router), Nuxt, Remix, SvelteKit, and Astro all ship HTML with the content already in it. In Nuxt, for example, make sure SSR has not been switched off:

   // nuxt.config.ts
   export default defineNuxtConfig({
     ssr: true, // default — do not set to false for content pages
   })

3. 3

   If you cannot migrate the SPA: prerender at build time (e.g. react-snap, vite-prerender-plugin, or your host’s prerendering) so each route has a static HTML snapshot, or serve bot traffic a rendered snapshot via a service like Prerender.io.

4. 4

   Redeploy, re-run the curl test — your headline and main copy must appear — then re-scan to confirm both rendering checks pass.

FAQ