Their dynamic rendering worked for two years. Then Google changed its mind.

Their dynamic rendering worked for two years. Then Google changed its mind.

A jobs board served prerendered HTML to bots and a React SPA to users — classic dynamic rendering via a third-party prerender service. It worked. 14,000 listings indexed, steady traffic. Until a 31% organic drop over three weeks with no algorithm update in sight.

The symptom was eerie: pages dropping out in clusters, and the cached versions in Search Console showing prerender-service error pages — 'snapshot timeout.'

Turns out their prerender service had silently started failing on heavier pages as the SPA bundle grew. Render times crept past the service's timeout. Googlebot got a 200 with a half-rendered or error snapshot. And Google had been clear for a while: dynamic rendering is a workaround, not a strategy. The team had built their indexing on a brittle middleman.

We migrated the listing pages to true SSR — content rendered by the same framework users get, no separate bot path, no timeout-prone snapshot service.

Indexation stabilized in four weeks. The 31% loss recovered to +5% versus pre-drop in nine weeks. And the monthly prerender bill — $1,400 — went to zero.

Serving bots a different pipeline than users is a debt. It comes due.