Prerendering

• Static prerendering: at build, each route is rendered once and saved as an HTML file. Every visitor and every crawler gets the same file. The browser then hydrates it into the interactive app.
• Prerendering for crawlers: at request time, a service detects a bot, renders the page in a headless browser and sends it the result. Human visitors get the client-rendered app. Google documents this as dynamic rendering.

When a hosting platform or a framework says it prerenders, find out which one it means. The first is a normal way to build a site. The second is a patch over a client-rendered one.

Google recommends server-side rendering, static rendering or hydration, and describes dynamic rendering as a workaround and not a recommended long-term solution. Static prerendering is on the recommended side: it is static rendering by another name.

A client-rendered app sends an HTML file with no text in it. Google renders it later, in a second pass; most AI crawlers never do. Prerendering the public routes puts the words, the title and the links in the first response, so every crawler reads the page the moment it fetches it.

You do not have to prerender the whole app. The dashboard behind the login can stay client-rendered; only the pages you want found need it.

# The text should be in the response, with no JavaScript run
curl -s https://yourproduct.com/pricing | grep -c 'a sentence from your pricing page'
curl -s https://yourproduct.com/pricing | grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>'

If the page is prerendered for crawlers only, curl with an ordinary user agent will show the empty shell, and a faked crawler user agent may too if the service only serves verified crawlers. Use the live test in Search Console's URL Inspection instead: its rendered HTML is what Google received.

Serving crawlers content that differs materially from what users see is cloaking under Google's spam policies. Prerendering the same content is not. The page a bot receives must carry the same text, links and offers as the page a person sees once the app has loaded.