The content Google never scrolled to

The content Google never scrolled to

A recipe site had perfect H1s but their method steps never ranked. Impressions for 'how to' queries: near zero. The detective work pointed at one API: IntersectionObserver. Here's the playbook.

— I rendered the page in mobile DevTools at Googlebot's viewport, then captured the rendered DOM without scrolling.
— The ingredients showed. The steps didn't — they mounted only when scrolled into view, and Googlebot doesn't scroll.
— Confirmed by throttling: the lazy section never entered the rendered HTML in the crawl snapshot.

The checklist to de-risk lazy mounts for crawlers:
— Never gate primary content behind scroll/click — only images and below-fold widgets
— If you must lazy-mount text, use loading="lazy" on media only, keep text in DOM
— Verify with the Rich Results test rendered HTML, not your browser

We forced the steps into initial render and lazied only the hero video.

Result: 'how to make' long-tail impressions went 400/mo → 61,000/mo, and the recipe block started winning featured snippets in 6 weeks.