the index, for example, via a noindex meta tag. Googlebot will queue the page to be rendered. The rendering may happen within seconds, or it may remain in the queue for a longer period of time. Rendering is a resource-intensive process, and as such, it may not be instantaneous. In the meantime, the bot will receive the DOM response; this is the content that is rendered before JavaScript is executed. This typically is the page HTML, which will be available as soon as the page is crawled. Once the JavaScript is executed, Googlebot will receive the fully constructed page, the “browser render.” Indexing Eligible pages and information will be stored in the Google index and made available to serve as search results at the point of user query. How Does Googlebot Handle Interactively Hidden Content? Not all content is available to users when they first land on a page. For example, you may need to click through tabs to find supplementary content, or expand an accordion to see all of the information. Googlebot doesn’t have the ability to switch between tabs, or to click open an accordion. So, making sure it can parse all the page’s information is important. The way to do this is to make sure that the information is contained within the DOM on the first load of the page. Meaning, content may be “hidden from view” on the front end before clicking a button, but it’s not hidden in the code. Think of it like this: The HTML content is “hidden in a box”; the JavaScript is the key to open the box. If Googlebot has to open the box, it may not see that content straightaway. However, if the server has opened the box before Googlebot requests it, then it should be able to get to that content via the DOM. How To Improve The Likelihood That Googlebot Will Be Able To Read Your Content The key to ensuring that content can be parsed by Googlebot is making it accessible without the need for the bot to render the JavaScript. One way of doing this is by forcing the rendering to happen on the server itself. Server-side rendering is the process by which a webpage is rendered on the server rather than by the browser. This means an HTML file is prepared and sent to the user’s browser (or the search engine bot), and the content of the page is accessible to them without waiting for the JavaScript to load. This is because the server has essentially created a file that has rendered content in it already; the HTML and CSS are accessible immediately. Meanwhile, JavaScript files that are stored on the server can be downloaded by the browser. This is opposed to client-side rendering, which requires the browser to fetch and compile the JavaScript before content is accessible on the webpage. This is a much lower lift for the server, which is why it is often favored by website developers, but it does mean that bots struggle to see the content on the page without rendering the JavaScript first. How Do LLM Bots Render JavaScript? Given what we now know about how Googlebot renders JavaScript, how does that differ from AI bots? The most important element to understand about the following is that, unlike Googlebot, there is no “one” governing body that represents all the bots that might be encompassed under “LLM bots.” That is, what one bot might be capable of doing won’t necessarily be the standard for all. The bots that scrape the web to power the knowledge bases of the LLMs are not the same as the bots that visit a page to bring back timely information to a user via a search engine. And Claude’s bots do not have the same capability as OpenAI’s. When we are considering how to ensure that AI bots can access our content, we have to cater to the lowest-capability bots. Less is known about how LLM bots render JavaScript, mainly because, unlike Google, the AI bots are not sharing that information. However, some very smart people have been running tests to identify how each of the main LLM bots handles it. Back in 2024, Vercel published an investigation into the JavaScript rendering capabilities of the main LLM bots, including OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, Meta’s, ByteDance’s, and Perplexity’s. According to their study, none of those bots were able to render JavaScript. The only ones that were, were Gemini (leveraging Googlebot’s infrastructure), Applebot, and CommonCrawl’s CCbot. More recently, Glenn Gabe reconfirmed Vercel’s findings through his own in-depth analysis of how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude handle JavaScript. He also runs through how to test your own website in the LLMs to see how they handle your content. These are the most well-known bots, from some of the most heavily funded AI companies in this space. It stands to reason that if they are struggling with JavaScript, lesser-funded or more niche ones will be also. How Do AI Bots Handle Interactively Hidden Content? Not well. That is, if the interactive content requires some execution of JavaScript, they may struggle to parse it. To ensure the bots are able to see content hidden behind tabs, or in accordions, it is prudent to ensure the content loads fully in the DOM without the need to execute JavaScript. Human visitors can still interact with the content to reveal it, but the bots won’t need to. Subscribe for Daily Search Insights AI, PPC, and digital marketing news distilled to fuel success. Join the other 75k marketers!