<b>The product grid that existed for users but not for Google</b>

<b>The product grid that existed for users but not for Google</b>

An electronics retailer lost 41% of category-page organic in one quarter. Rankings hadn't moved — the pages simply stopped earning clicks. Strange, because the products were right there on screen.

We pulled the rendered HTML through the URL Inspection tool's live test. The grid was empty. Forty products in the browser, zero in Googlebot's render.

Turns out the grid hydrated only after an IntersectionObserver fired on scroll. Googlebot doesn't scroll. It renders a tall viewport once and snapshots. Everything below an invisible fold never mounted, so the crawler saw a category page with no products and quietly demoted it as thin.

The fix wasn't to kill lazy-loading. We rendered the first 12 products server-side and let the observer hydrate the rest for humans. Crawler gets content, user gets the bandwidth savings.

—41% organic → +7% above the pre-drop baseline in 11 weeks
—Indexed product count per category: 0 → 12 in the first recrawl

The lesson stuck: if your content waits for scroll, the most important crawler on earth never sees it.