Is your website blank to search engines? The View Source test

A site can look complete in your browser and still hand an empty page to everything else. This happens when the page is built by JavaScript after it loads. Your browser runs the JavaScript and shows you the words. A search engine or an AI tool may take the empty version.

The one-minute test

1. Open your homepage.
2. Right-click and choose View Page Source. This shows what the server sent, before any JavaScript ran.
3. Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for a sentence from the page.

If you find it, the words are in the page. If you find almost nothing, only scripts and a nearly empty shell, the words are built in the browser.

Do this on more than the homepage. Repeat it for a service page and any tool page.

Why it matters

Google can run JavaScript, but it does so later than the first read and not always reliably. Many other crawlers, including some used by AI tools, are reported not to run JavaScript at all. If the words are only there after a script runs, some of those tools may see nothing to store or quote.

Many site builders and frameworks can put the text in the page ahead of time, so the words are there before any JavaScript runs. The setting is called server-side rendering or static generation.

Also check

• Text in images. If your prices or your service area are inside pictures, nothing can read them. Put them in normal page text.
• Text in pop-ups. Content that only appears after a click may not be read either.
• Highlight test. Try to select your prices with the mouse. If you cannot select them, a robot cannot read them.

After the fix

Run the View Source test again. Then check site:yourdomain.com in Google after a week. The Pages report in Search Console will show whether Google now reads the pages.

This is one of 52 checks in the Business Website Launch Checklist, in the chapter Build.