How to Check Whether a Page's Content Appears in Its Raw HTML for AI Crawlers
A page may look complete in a browser yet deliver little content in its initial HTML, which matters when a crawler does not execute JavaScript the way a browser does. The author advises checking whether the response itself contains the desired content rather than assuming a specific AI system's rendering behavior. Suggested methods include fetching the page with a crawler-style user agent via curl, grepping for known phrases, roughly counting words after stripping tags, and disabling JavaScript in developer tools to compare results. Common patterns that hide content from the first response include client-side fetching, scroll-triggered loading, client-side routing, and JavaScript-injected structured data. The author stresses that these checks are rough diagnostics, that passing them does not guarantee citations or rankings, and that the deployed URL should be re-checked after changes.
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