
I pulled the raw HTML of a bunch of "SEO-ready" startup sites. Google can see them fine — but AI search can't.
I went down a rabbit hole reading SEO threads where founders were panicking that their React/Lovable/Vite sites weren't ranking. The usual advice is "JavaScript sites are invisible to Google, you need SSR." So I started pulling the raw HTML (what a crawler sees before any JavaScript runs) for a bunch of real sites people posted.
Here's what actually surprised me: almost none of them had the "empty page" problem everyone fears. Lovable prerenders now. Next.js sites render server-side. The old "Google can't see my React app" panic is mostly solved. Their content was right there in the HTML.
But there was a different problem hiding underneath, and almost nobody was talking about it: none of them were set up to be seen or cited by AI search. No idea whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Gemini were even crawling them. No structured data for an AI to quote cleanly. No comparison/answer content for the questions people now type straight into ChatGPT. Their Google SEO was fine — and they were completely invisible in the place buyers are increasingly starting.
That's the gap I think most founders are quietly losing right now. Everyone's still optimizing for the ten blue links while a chunk of their buyers ask an AI "what's the best tool for X" and get handed three competitors — never them.
So I built RenderlySEO to make that visible. It replays exactly what each crawler (Google and the AI engines) received for every URL, shows which AI bots actually fetched your pages, tracks who they cite for your topics, and gives you a prioritized fix list instead of 200 generic warnings. Built specifically for JS stacks — Lovable, React, Next, Vite, Bolt, Replit.
The core idea: stop guessing what Google and AI "probably" see, and just look at what they actually received.
Would love feedback from people building JS-heavy or AI-generated sites — especially: is AI visibility something you're thinking about yet, or still 100% focused on Google?