DOM and Prerender.io Team Up To Help Search Engines See Invisible Websites

The web has never looked better. If you’re as old as me, you might remember what browsing the web looked like when you had to type in every address yourself and cross your fingers that you spelled it right. Forget search engines. We didn’t even have Yahoo! yet.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• We’ve Seen This Happen Again and Again
• Why DOM Made This Official
• This Doesn’t Replace Content or Strategy
• Here’s What to Do Next
• Key Takeaways

Fast forward from those days to now and you skip through a lot of history and questionable design decisions like embedded autoplay RealPlayer songs, giant GIFs that took ages to download over your chugging 14.4 modem, and, eventually, entire websites made with Adobe Flash.

You might think those days are over, but you’d be wrong. Websites load a lot faster, web browsers work a lot better, and ubiquitous broadband has made big websites the norm rather than an SEO-killing exception. Some modern websites rely on JavaScript to deliver a faster, more dynamic experience to impatient users. They load quickly, look polished, and function exactly how users expect.

This might be great for users but search engines don’t always process JavaScript the way people do. Pages built to engage users can go unseen by crawlers. Content that should appear in search results doesn’t. The result is less traffic, fewer conversions, and lost opportunities.

AI search tools present a similar challenge. Despite handling billions of searches each month, they currently do not render JavaScript. This leaves major portions of many websites completely hidden from view — product catalogs, pricing updates, blog content, and key service pages all fall through the cracks.

Search visibility issues like these cost businesses billions each year. Without server-side rendering or a dedicated rendering solution, up to 30% of a website’s content may never reach search engines or AI tools. The content exists but remains functionally invisible. We’ve seen it before: a client’s entire website is effectively invisible because the search engines simply can’t see it.

This is the reason DOM partnered with Prerender.io.

We’ve Seen This Happen Again and Again

This isn’t a one-time glitch or a random issue that pops up on obscure websites. As a digital marketing agency, We’ve seen it over and over again. A company has a modern site, maybe built with React, Vue, or Angular. Everything looks perfect to a human visitor. You would never know anything was different. Pages load quickly, navigation is smooth, and everything works as it should.

This is the problem, unfortunately. What looks great to a person is only half the story. Search engines don’t see what users see. They get the page and get an empty shell.

Here’s why: JavaScript frameworks render content in the browser, not on the server. That’s called client-side rendering. The browser builds the page on the fly using data it pulls in after the initial load. This works fine for human beings, because our browsers understand and can make JavaScript into the websites we expect.

But crawlers don’t always wait around for the script to finish doing its job. Time is money, and the longer a bot spends trying to figure out what it’s supposed to see, the more expensive it is to operate. Therefore, they grab what’s there right away and it’s usually just a basic HTML structure with none of the actual content.

So while a customer might see a fully-loaded product page, a search engine bot sees an empty <div>. Do you know what happens when a bot sees empty pages? I’ll give you three guesses, but I bet you’ll only need one. Not only does that search engine not know what keywords users would use to find your website, it doesn’t even know what your website is about because it won’t stick around long enough to read it once it renders, if it can render pages at all.

Fixing this used to mean setting up server-side rendering with various third party tools, which isn’t a bad approach, but it takes time, development resources, and a pretty solid understanding of how rendering pipelines work. Some teams tried hybrid approaches. Others leaned on middleware to patch the gap. Most of those solutions created more work than they solved. This is why we recommend Prerender.io, and why this partnership was too obvious to pass up.

Why DOM Made This Official

We’ve been pointing clients toward Prerender.io for a while now. Quietly at first, then with a bit more confidence once we started seeing what it could actually do. Prerender.io does exactly what it says on the tin: it prerenders web pages so Google and ChatGPT and every other finicky bot can see what the page shows after it’s all loaded up.

Also, yes, you read that right – ChatGPT has its own crawlers and, yes, DOM does SEO for ChatGPT searches, too.

Anyway, when a site that was invisible to search engines gets crawled properly, we saw traffic start climbing. Rankings recovered. Pages that had been invisible started showing up in crawl reports again. Indexing percentages improved. Suddenly, a bot wasn’t just guessing what the site was about because it knew.

This wasn’t some temporary lift or one lucky case. It kept happening. Different clients. Different stacks. Same result.

This partnership gives our clients a faster, easier way to solve a very common, very expensive problem. No huge dev effort. No guessing games. Just better visibility, better indexing, and better results.

This Doesn’t Replace Content or Strategy

Prerender.io doesn’t write copy, it doesn’t build backlinks, and it definitely doesn’t choose your keywords. It’s not meant to replace your SEO strategy. It’s meant to make sure the strategy has a chance to work.

You can have the best-written product pages, the sharpest technical SEO, and a rock-solid keyword plan, but if search engines can’t see the page, none of it counts.

Prerender.io clears that first hurdle. It makes the content visible so everything else you’re doing actually has a shot.

Here’s What to Do Next

If your site leans heavily on JavaScript, indexing issues might already be holding it back—and you wouldn’t know just by looking.

That’s why checking for rendering problems is already part of our standard SEO audit. We look at how all the major search engines see your pages, not just how those pages look to users.

Our SEO audit covers more than just rendering. We check technical health, keyword performance, crawl depth, indexation, internal linking, page speed, and a whole lot more. You’ll get a detailed report, plain-language explanations, and a roadmap with real steps. And now, thanks to our partnership with Prerender.io, that roadmap includes a proven solution to one of the biggest indexing problems modern websites face.

Get in touch with us today for a free digital marketing audit.

Key Takeaways

• The web has gotten faster and better looking, but that doesn’t mean it’s easier for bots to understand
• Modern sites built with JavaScript can appear empty to crawlers, even when they look great to users
• Rendering issues prevent important content like products, pricing, and service pages from showing up in search
• DOM partnered with Prerender.io to fix visibility problems without rebuilding your site
• Prerender.io makes sure bots see the full content so your SEO strategy can actually work
• This solution is now part of our standard audit and implementation process for JavaScript-heavy websites