Server-side rendering
Server-side rendering builds a page's full HTML on the server, so bots get all the text without running any scripts.
Server-side rendering is when your server builds the whole page, text and all, before sending it. The visitor's browser, or a bot, gets complete HTML straight away. The alternative is client-side rendering, where the server sends a near-empty page and a script in the browser fills in the content.
For AI search it's one of the most reliable technical fixes you can make. Bots read the HTML your server sends. If your text only appears after a script runs, many of them never see it.
Why it matters for AI bots
A person's browser runs your scripts, so the page looks fine to you. Many bots fetch the HTML and move on without running anything. What they get is whatever was in the HTML when it left your server.
Google can run scripts when it renders pages, though it's done in a separate step, as it explains in its JavaScript SEO basics. You can't count on every AI bot doing the same.
An example
Fernhill Coffee's shop is built so that the product names, prices and descriptions load with a script. To a customer, the page looks complete. To a bot, it's a header, a footer and an empty box. So when someone asks an AI platform about Fernhill's prices, it has nothing from Fernhill's own site to go on, and it quotes a review site's old figures instead.
Fernhill switches its product pages to server-side rendering. The prices are now in the HTML, and answers start quoting them.
Other ways to get there
Full server-side rendering isn't the only route. Static generation builds pages ahead of time, which works well for pages that rarely change. Many frameworks let you render the important text on the server and leave interactive parts to scripts. What counts is that the words you want read are in the first HTML the server sends.
In AnswerOrbit
Open a page in the Pages tab of Website and AI traffic to see What a person sees next to What a bot reads. Blocks bots miss are marked Hidden from bots, with why and how to fix it. "Shown without scripts" is one of the eight Page checks in Recommendations.