<b>Googlebot renders your JavaScript. Just not when you think</b>

<b>Googlebot renders your JavaScript. Just not when you think</b>

The panic that Googlebot can't run JavaScript is a decade out of date. It runs an evergreen Chromium. But the comforting version, "it sees everything instantly," is also wrong.

Rendering happens in two waves. First the raw HTML gets crawled and indexed. Rendering, where your JS-injected content appears, is queued separately and can lag, sometimes minutes, sometimes much longer when resources are tight. Google says the median is short, but the median isn't your worst case.

For crawl efficiency this matters: if your key content and links only exist after JS runs, you've added a whole second stage Google has to schedule and pay for. Server-side render the important stuff and skip the queue.

Google can render your page. Whether it will today is the open question.