What it checks
We read the HTML the server sends, without executing any script, and count the characters of text inside main or article (falling back to the body when neither exists). We also note when the page is a bare application shell: a root element and script tags, with nothing to read.
Why it matters for search engines
Googlebot does render JavaScript, but rendering is queued and happens after the initial crawl, so content that exists only after scripts run is indexed later and less reliably than content in the HTML source. Everything in the raw HTML is available on the first pass.
Why it matters for AI assistants
Crawlers operated by AI assistants fetch pages far more often than they render them. Measurements of crawler traffic show the major AI crawlers fetching HTML without executing JavaScript. For them, a client-rendered page is an empty page.
How to fix it
Server-render or pre-render the page so the main content is in the HTML the server sends, inside main or article. Frameworks with a server-rendering mode make this a build setting; static generation works for pages that rarely change.
18,181 characters of content readable from <main>/<article> without JavaScript.What quietwatch reports
ok with the character count. warn when the page is an app shell or the readable text is very short. fail when there is no readable content at all. unknown when the page could not be fetched.
Sources
- Google, Understand JavaScript SEO basics
- Vercel, The rise of the AI crawler (crawler rendering measurements)
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