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Technical GEO Intermediate
Step 6 of 8

Rendering: SSR vs CSR for AI crawlers

The single biggest invisible failure mode in technical GEO is shipping client-side-rendered content to a crawler that doesn’t run JavaScript. Half the major AI fetchers do, the other half don’t, and the cost of getting this wrong is total invisibility on the engines that don’t — no warning, no error, just absence from the index.

What to read for this step

  1. SSR vs CSR for AI Crawlers
    Wiki · coming soon
  2. JavaScript & AI Crawlers
    Wiki · coming soon
  3. Core Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS)
    Wiki

After this step, you should be able to answer

  • Which AI crawlers execute JavaScript, and which see only the initial HTML?
  • How do you choose between SSR, SSG, dynamic rendering, and edge SSR for AI-facing pages?
  • Do INP / LCP / CLS actually affect AI citation, or only Google AI Overviews?