JavaScript SEO
JavaScript SEO is making sure search engines and AI bots can read the pages on a site that uses JavaScript to build its content.
JavaScript SEO is the part of technical SEO that makes sure search engines can read pages that are built with JavaScript. Many modern sites send the browser a near-empty page and a script, and the script then fills in the text, links and products. People see a full page. A crawler that doesn't run the script sees much less.
For AI search, this is one of the most common reasons a good page never gets used.
How Google handles JavaScript
Google processes JavaScript pages in three steps: it crawls the page, renders it by running the scripts in a headless browser, and then indexes what it found. Rendering can wait in a queue, so content that a script adds may be picked up later than content in the HTML. Google still recommends server-side rendering or pre-rendering, and notes that not all bots can run JavaScript.
AI bots often don't run scripts
That last point matters most here. The bots AI platforms send to read the web mostly read the HTML your server sends, and many of them don't run your scripts at all. So text that only appears after a script runs can be invisible to them, even if Google indexes it fine.
For example, Kestrel Roasters' coffee pages load the tasting notes, prices and reviews with a script after the page opens. A person sees all of it. An AI bot gets a page with a title, a menu and an empty box, so when someone asks which Kestrel coffee is fruitiest, the platform has nothing from Kestrel's own site to go on.
How to fix it
Put the content that matters into the HTML your server sends. Server-side rendering, static generation and pre-rendering all do this, and most modern frameworks support at least one of them. Use real <a href> links, so bots can follow them. Then check what a bot actually receives.
In AnswerOrbit
Open a page in the Pages tab in Website to see What a person sees next to What a bot reads. Blocks that bots miss are marked Hidden from bots, with why and how to fix it. Page checks in Recommendations include Shown without scripts. See Website and AI traffic.