Three ways to test what Google renders — they disagree

Three ways to test what Google renders — they disagree
Framing: when a JS-heavy page drops, you need to see what Googlebot sees. The tools give different answers and that's the point.

🔗 [GSC URL Inspection — 'View crawled page'] — authoritative rendered HTML and screenshot from Google itself; this is the verdict.
🔗 [Rich Results Test / Mobile-Friendly equivalent] — quick live render, good for schema validation but a lighter renderer than indexing.
🔗 [Local headless render (Puppeteer/Playwright)] — reproduces issues at scale and in CI, but it's your Chrome, not Google's WRS.

The tradeoff: local tools are fast and scriptable but can render content Google never sees; URL Inspection is slow and one-at-a-time but final. Use local to triage hundreds of pages, GSC to confirm the verdict on the worst one.

One to bookmark: URL Inspection's rendered-HTML view — the only screenshot that settles a 'but it works in my browser' argument.