The Story
A world leader in online gaming and sports betting since 1997.
888 Holdings is one of the world’s most established online gaming and betting companies, operating two major consumer-facing brands with a combined global reach of nearly five million monthly users.
888casino has maintained a strong presence in international online gambling since 1997, amassing prestigious industry awards across nearly three decades and attracting more than 2.3 million monthly players to its software. 888sports, the group’s sports betting arm, has grown into a trusted destination for competitive wagering across football, basketball, tennis, and more, drawing over 2.6 million monthly visitors.
Both brands operate JavaScript-heavy websites that serve dynamic, constantly updating content. For a business where product freshness is measured in hours rather than days, getting that content indexed accurately and quickly is a business necessity.
The Challenge
Time-critical content that crawlers couldn’t keep up with.
The core tension at 888 Holdings is one that most SEO teams don’t quite face at this intensity: betting content expires. For example, a match preview for a Champions League game has a lifespan measured in hours. If Google can’t render and index a page before the event kicks off, that page delivers zero organic value. Otherwise, it’s a dead URL before it ever ranks.
With client-side rendering across both 888casino and 888sports, every page depends on JavaScript executing before a crawler sees any meaningful content. And as Guy Sasson, SEO Lead at 888 Holdings, observed, Google’s capacity to process JS-heavy sites is finite.
“Since we know Google’s resources to crawl a JavaScript site are limited, we knew we had to find a solution for it,” shared Sasson. That’s where Prerender.io came in. Today, their large-scale and dynamic sports betting sites use Prerender.io due to the number of sports events offered for users to place their bets. “We are not compromising when it comes to serving Google fully rendered pages.”
Here, we’re talking about hosting hundreds of sporting events from various sports types and countries that take place every day—accumulating to 5700+ URLs on average per month.
It is clear that to maintain their favorable place at the top of SERPs and in users’ minds, relying on Google’s indexing process only won’t be enough to fully support such large-scale websites.
Since we know Google’s resources to crawl a JavaScript site are limited, we knew we had to find a solution for it. Prerender.io was that choice.
The Solution
Rendering without sacrificing the CSR experience.
888 Holdings adopted Prerender.io as the rendering layer between their JavaScript frontends and Google’s crawler. The approach allowed both brands to retain all the user-experience benefits of client-side rendering while guaranteeing that search engines—and Bing, social crawlers, and other bots—always received a fully rendered version of every page.
Sasson’s goal was unambiguous: “to serve Google the best version of our pages and as close as possible to the live versions.” Prerender.io made that achievable without touching the application architecture.
Why Prerender.io
- Preserved all benefits of CSR for end users while solving the bot-rendering gap
- Simple three-step installation with clear, actionable documentation
- Fast support response times that resolved configuration questions to completion
- No ongoing engineering dependency after initial setup
The adoption process was deliberately low-friction. With an SEO team operating at the pace demanded by live sports content, weeks-long implementations weren’t viable. Prerender.io was live in record time and producing results almost immediately.
The Results
Full control over indexation at enterprise scale.
By taking the rendering process out of Google’s hands and into their own, 888 Holdings transformed what had been an unpredictable crawl process into a reliable, consistent pipeline.
After integration, 888 was able to maintain and secure its top SERP positions without relying on extensive resources. Despite operating heavy JavaScript sites with fast-moving, time-sensitive content running on CSR, 888 Holdings has sustained its position among the world’s leading gaming and betting destinations in search. Where relying solely on Google’s native JS rendering would have created inevitable coverage gaps, Prerender.io ensures every URL is served correctly, every time.
Lastly, the 888 team was able to avoid extensive engineering costs. Implementing SSR across two large-scale, actively developed platforms would have required significant engineering resources, ongoing maintenance overhead, and a meaningful architectural commitment. By deploying Prerender.io instead, 888’s development teams remained focused on product development, not rendering infrastructure.
Looking Forward
A rendering foundation built for what comes next.
The online gambling industry is evolving on two fronts simultaneously. Regulation, market expansion, and platform development continue to push both 888casino and 888sports into new territories, each requiring strong local SEO from day one. At the same time, the emergence of AI-powered search and LLM-driven discovery channels is raising the bar for what it means to have truly machine-readable content.
For 888 Holdings, Prerender.io provides the infrastructure to meet both challenges. As new markets are entered or platforms are updated, the rendering layer ensures that bots, whether traditional search crawlers or AI agents, consistently receive the fully structured, rendered content they need to understand and surface 888’s pages.
In a category where a single high-intent query (“Champions League betting tonight”) can drive significant commercial volume, the ability to guarantee fast, accurate indexation of time-sensitive content is a structural competitive advantage. Prerender.io makes that guarantee possible, without tying up the engineers who build the products.
Thanks to Prerender.io, we were able to secure our top positions in SERPs, optimize our indexing, and avoid extra engineering costs. For us, that’s perfect.
