FAQs
Prerendering is a complex subject, and it’s not always easy to understand its importance for an enterprise website or a single-page app’s organic growth. But after more than a decade of working with clients of all sizes and industries, we’ve compiled the most common questions in one place. Pin this as your hub for all things rendering.
Find out more about Prerender.io, technical SEO, JavaScript, and more.
There are three major reasons to optimize the rendering of your JS site:
1. Search engines and AI crawlers can’t handle JavaScript content correctly. In most cases, search engines take 9x longer to crawl and index JS-based pages than regular HTML sites. This leads to a lot of issues like missing content, limited crawl budgets, and lower rankings. By prerendering your pages, you’ll solve all JS SEO issues at the root.
2. PageSpeed impacts your rankings. Unresponsive, slow pages are frustrating for everyone, including search bots, and JavaScript has the biggest impact in loading times. To increase your site’s chances of getting into the first spots in search results, your pages need to load in 1 – 2 seconds or less. Prerender nails this by delivering your pages in 0,03 seconds on average.
3. Most rendering solutions are expensive, hard to implement, and have negative effects that are difficult to work around. Traditional solutions like server-side rendering often require a minimum of $100k in upfront investment to cover server equipment, software infrastructure, and engineering time, and still have a negative impact on your site’s time to first byte (TTFB) and first input delay (FID).
In contrast, Prerender.io takes just a couple of hours to install and test, and will improve your visibility across search and AI platforms for a fraction of the cost, with none of the drawbacks.
The short answer is yes, but indirectly. Prerender is designed to help solve all JavaScript-related issues for enterprise and single-page application sites.
This means your pages will get higher performance scores (which is a confirmed ranking factor), increase crawl budget and speed up the indexing and re-indexing of your website. These benefits alone can take you further on your SEO journey than any manual workarounds.
However, your site’s rankings are determined by a plethora of factors like content and backlinks. Prerender will give you a solid foundation for your SEO campaign by handling the challenges of JavaScript optimization, allowing you to focus on other essential factors.
Taking advantage of the rendering process, Prerender.io scores your page’s technical optimization and allows you to detect optimization opportunities or technical SEO issues that can affect your site’s SEO performance.
You’ll also be able to monitor metrics like Prerender’s time to fully load your pages, which can be a great benchmark to understand how the end user (aka your customers) will experience your site and optimize it accordingly.
We use an advanced version of prerendering. Prerender fetches all the necessary resources to build your pages and caches a pre-rendered version of them.
When a new request is sent to your page, Prerender’s middleware will determine whether it’s a search bot or a human user. If it’s a search crawler like Googlebot or GPTBot, it’ll send the cached version to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index its content.
If it’s a human user, they will get redirected through your normal server routes, solving all JavaScript-related SEO issues and allowing you to provide an immersive, JavaScript-rich experience to your customers. Learn the full details of Prerender’s process.
Yes! We help you stay visible across all search, social, and AI platforms. Basically, wherever your audience searches—whether that’s Google, Reddit, TikTok, Claude, or ChatGPT. We don’t charge per bot, so you don’t need to worry about extra costs there.
Some default bots include:
prerender.crawlerUserAgents = [
‘googlebot’,
‘Yahoo! Slurp’,
‘bingbot’,
‘yandex’,
‘baiduspider’,
‘facebookexternalhit’,
‘twitterbot’,
‘rogerbot’,
‘linkedinbot’,
’embedly’,
‘quora link preview’,
‘showyoubot’,
‘outbrain’,
‘pinterest/0.’,
‘developers.google.com/+/web/snippet’,
‘slackbot’,
‘vkShare’,
‘W3C_Validator’,
‘redditbot’,
‘Applebot’,
‘WhatsApp’,
‘flipboard’,
‘tumblr’,
‘bitlybot’,
‘SkypeUriPreview’,
‘nuzzel’,
‘Discordbot’,
‘Google Page Speed’,
‘Qwantify’,
‘pinterestbot’,
‘Bitrix link preview’,
‘XING-contenttabreceiver’,
‘Chrome-Lighthouse’,
‘TelegramBot’,
‘SeznamBot’,
‘GPTBot’
];
The best part of using Prerender is that it is an automated process. Although you can submit a sitemap to speed up the rendering process of critical URLs, the middleware installed on your backend will detect any request coming from a recognized crawler and generate a cached version for every URL requested without needing further configuration.
That way, the service will scale as your site scales automatically. This is ideal when, for example, you can’t predict all URLs in advance.
Most AI crawlers, like ChatGPT or Perplexity, can’t run JavaScript-generated pages. If your content (e.g., product pricing, inventory, or tabs) loads via JS, AI tools see a blank page—so your site won’t appear in their answers.
Google can often process JavaScript content better than AI crawlers. This means that even if you rank high on Google, AI tools may not see your content, so it doesn’t get featured in AI-generated answers.
Many AI crawlers cannot read JavaScript content, causing key AEO elements like product details, pricing, or reviews to go unseen. And if AI bots can’t see your content, it won’t appear in AI-driven answers. Content prerendering with Prerender.io solves this by ensuring your JS content is visible to AI crawlers, improving your eligibility for AI search exposure.
Most AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript. They depend on HTML to read and understand your pages. If your site is built with JavaScript, it is likely that AI crawlers can’t see your content unless you optimize it with prerendering. Prerender.io renders your content, making it compatible with both search engines (Google) and AI platforms (ChatGPT). Learn more about how to get featured on AI searches.
Most AI search engines (like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT) can’t process and fetch website content built with JavaScript, causing your content to not appear in search results. Prerender.io solves this by turning your JS content into its HTML version, a format that AI bots can easily read. This makes it easier for your site to be featured in AI-generated answers, summaries, and featured search results. Get details on AI search optimization with Prerender.io.
Yes! Prerender.io makes your website more AI-friendly by ensuring that AI tools can “see” all the key details on your site (like product info, pricing, or reviews) so no content will be skipped.
Many sites use JavaScript to load these details, but most AI crawlers struggle with JavaScript. Prerender.io fixes this by turning those pages into plain HTML, a format AI and LLM platforms can easily include in their answers.
Many Prerender.io customers see AI visibility improvements within weeks, including more AI crawlers visiting your site and your content appearing in AI-generated answers.
Yes, there is. You can monitor your AI crawler behavior directly within your dashboard. Our Product team is consistently working on expanding these AI insights, with ongoing developments in the works.
We offer a free 30-day trial of our Starter plan—no credit card required. After your 30 days are up, you can continue for $49/month or on one of our paid plans.
Our older free plan (1,000 renders/month) was discontinued in 2025, and has now been replaced with this 30-day trial.
We offer four plans, catered to smaller startups or larger enterprises:
All plans offer unlimited domains and are billed monthly.
You’re only charged for cached tasks, such as the first time a page is rendered, or when it needs to be re-rendered to reflect your latest changes. Serving a page from cache to crawlers is free.
If you exceed your plan’s included renders, overage charges apply: $2 per 1,000 on Starter, $1.50 per 1,000 on Growth, and $1.25 per 1,000 on Pro.
Visit our pricing page to learn more about each plan.
Yes! All plans include unlimited domains. You can run as many sites as you need under a single account, making it easy for agencies or large enterprise businesses with multiple domains.
We calculate renders based on the number of unique pages you have, multiplied by how often those pages need to be refreshed.
For example, an ecommerce store with 1,000 pages that updates daily would need 1,000 × 30 days = 30,000 renders per month. And since each page is rendered once for desktop and once for mobile crawlers, you’d double that number — 30,000 × 2 = 60,000 renders per month.
The main levers are your page count, your cache expiration setting (how frequently pages re-render), and whether you’re rendering for both desktop and mobile. Use the Render Calculator on the pricing page to get a number tailored to your site.
If you go over your plan’s included renders, you’ll be automatically charged for the extra usage at your plan’s overage rate: $2 per 1,000 on Starter, $1.50 per 1,000 on Growth, and $1.25 per 1,000 on Pro. There’s no service interruption or hard cutoff.
If you’re consistently going over, it’s worth it to see if you can optimize your usage. Common causes of overages include:
However, if you’ve optimized and you’re still regularly exceeding your limit, upgrading is usually more cost-effective than paying overage rates month after month. Our team is happy to help you find the right path for you.
Nope! You can track as many crawlers as you like. Our pricing is based on renders, not crawler requests.
Use our Render Calculator on the pricing page to see how many renders your site needs.
Every time we render a page—either for the first time or when we refresh it to pick up your latest changes—that counts as one render against your monthly plan. Serving that cached page to crawlers afterwards is free, no matter how many times it gets requested.
So your render count is really determined by how many unique pages you have and how often you have them refreshed, not by how much crawler traffic you receive.
You can use the Render Calculator on the pricing page to estimate your monthly renders.
You can upgrade at any time directly from the Billing menu within your account.
If you’re looking to move to Enterprise Plus, the process is a little different. Enterprise plans are custom-priced based on your specific needs, so the best next step is to reach out to our team directly. We’ll walk you through the options and put together the right package for you.
If you’re not sure which plan is the right fit, our team is happy to help! Get in touch from within your account.
When an AI crawler or search engine bot visits your site, Prerender.io intercepts the request at your CDN or server, renders your JavaScript page in a headless browser, caches the result, and returns clean HTML to the crawler, all transparently. Your website visitors never touch this flow.
Yes!
No matter what JavaScript framework or technologies your backend was built with, Prerender.io integrates with modern tech stacks. You won’t have to rewrite your code or change anything in your setup.
For a full list of Prerender.io integrations, visit our documentation.
On average, Prerender.io takes 2 to 4 hours to install and test to ensure everything is working properly. It doesn’t require extensive knowledge, and our team will support you every step of the way if needed. Find the installation instructions based on your tech stack.
Not necessarily, but some technical involvement helps for the initial integration part.
We install as middleware on your server or CDN. For most common stacks, we have step-by-step integration guides in our documentation.
Once you’re live, the day-to-day operations (managing your sitemap, adjusting cache settings, monitoring render usage, etc.) is all in our dashboard and is accessible to non-developers.
If your team doesn’t have in-house technical resources, our support team can guide you through setup.
Yes! But it’s worth understanding when you actually need us.
If you’re using Next.js or Nuxt in fully server-side rendering mode, your pages are already being delivered as HTML to crawlers, so we may not be necessary for those pages.
Where we add value is when your SSR framework is only partially rendering content, when you have client-side-only routes, or when performance and cache control at scale become a bottleneck.
For hybrid setups, we slot in cleanly alongside your existing stack without requiring any code changes.
If you’re unsure whether your setup needs us, our team is happy to take a look.
To integrate Prerender.io with a Bubble.io app, you’ll need a custom plan that includes a dedicated server so you’re able to install our middleware.
Standard plans won’t be able to integrate.
Yes, and it’s actually one of the most important integrations for vibe-coded sites. Lovable sites are built on React, which means crawlers and AI platforms struggle with your content by default. Prerender.io fixes this without touching your code.
The integration runs through Cloudflare, which sits in front of your domain and routes requests. Bots get pre-rendered HTML from us, while your regular visitors are proxied transparently to your Lovable app as normal. The setup takes around 30 to 45 minutes.
Once it’s in place, your dynamic routes become crawlable, titles and meta descriptions are recognized, and social link previews start working correctly.
Full step-by-step instructions are available in our documentation.
Dynamic rendering refers to the process of serving content based on what the user agent requests. Search engine crawlers get static HTML, and humans get dynamic JavaScript content. Dynamic rendering is implemented to optimize the indexing quality of JS content, while still serving interactive JS-based websites to users.
You can build your own dynamic rendering solution, such as SSR, or adopt a plug-and-play solution like Prerender.io.
Usually, this question comes from people worried about cloaking penalties. Let us reassure you that there’s no risk at all. In fact, Prerender.io has been a recommended choice by Google.
Prerender.io does not change any content on your page. It just renders the HTML file and all resources and delivers the result to crawlers. Users and Googlebot or GPTBot will receive the same content.
On the other hand, cloaking is about misleading search engines to index a page for irrelevant keywords by serving crawlers one type of content and providing people with a totally different page when they click the link in search results.
SSR refers to generating the HTML version of your JavaScript pages on the SSR server, before sending them to the user’s browser. This way your JS content is indexed and loaded quickly.
The initial cost of building an SSR system is estimated to start at $120,000, and this only increases with the size of your business. This estimate includes expenses for technical expertise, infrastructure, and other resources.
It’s important to remember that SSR requires ongoing maintenance, and scaling it will demand more advanced infrastructure and additional development time. Learn more about the requirements for building an in-house SSR here.
Enjoy a free 30-day trial of our Starter plan, or browse paid plans to find the right option for you.
Serving +2.7 billion pages to crawlers.
