Why this page loaded before you blinked
This page is fully rendered on the server. By the time it reached your browser, every word and every link was already in the HTML. Nothing had to run, fetch, or hydrate for you — or for Googlebot — to read it.
The whole game in one sentence
The perfect page for a crawler is a static HTML document, served from the edge, with all its content and links in the raw response, and almost no JavaScript. Everything in this starter is about getting as close to that ideal as possible while staying maintainable.
Why server rendering, specifically
Googlebot can render JavaScript, but it does so on a delayed second pass with a budget. Server-rendered HTML gets understood on the first pass — faster and more reliably indexed.
For AI crawlers the stakes are higher: most of them don’t execute JavaScript at all. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends largely read raw HTML. A client-rendered site is effectively invisible to the systems now answering questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Server rendering isn’t just a performance nicety — it’s how you stay visible.
What that buys you
- Core Web Vitals pass without effort, because there’s barely any JavaScript to block the main thread.
- Accessibility comes mostly for free, because semantic HTML is doing the work.
- AI legibility is built in via
llms.txt, an/llm-infopage, and schema.org JSON-LD on every page.
Replace this post with real content when you clone the starter — but keep the principles.