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Rendering (client vs server)
Rendering is how your code becomes the final HTML a crawler reads. Where it happens, in the browser or on the server, decides what search engines can see.
What it is
Rendering is the step where your code turns into the finished HTML a browser shows and a crawler reads.
There are two broad ways to do it. Server rendering (SSR or SSG) builds the full HTML before it leaves your server, so the content is already there when it arrives. Client-side rendering (CSR) ships a near-empty HTML shell plus JavaScript, then the browser builds the page after the fact.
The difference sounds technical, but it decides one practical thing: whether your words exist in the HTML on arrival, or only appear once JavaScript has run.
Why it matters
Googlebot can run JavaScript, but rendering it costs time and happens in a second pass, so client-rendered content is read later and less reliably than it would be in plain HTML. Googlebot also reads only the first 2MB of an HTML page, and other AI answer engines often skip JavaScript entirely.
The fix is to put your real content in the server-rendered HTML. If a key page shows nothing useful with JavaScript disabled, it is at risk of being invisible to the very systems you want to be found by. See our guide to JavaScript SEO for how to test this, and crawlability for the step that comes before rendering.
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