Server-side rendering
Generating a page's full HTML on the server for each request, so crawlers and users receive complete markup without executing JavaScript.
Crawling IndexingStatic prerendering
Prerendering
Generating and caching a fully rendered HTML snapshot of a JavaScript page at build time or on request, so crawlers receive complete markup.
In full
Prerendering can be done at build time (static site generation) or by a runtime service that renders with a headless browser and caches the output. Unlike dynamic rendering it should serve the same HTML to users and crawlers to avoid cloaking risk. It removes dependence on the search engine's render queue and is the most reliable way to make JavaScript-dependent content visible to AI crawlers that do not execute scripts.
Example
A Next.js site pre-builds 40,000 product pages at deploy time so every crawler gets complete HTML on first fetch.
Related terms
Dynamic rendering
Serving a server-rendered HTML version to crawlers and a client-rendered version to users; Google now describes it as a deprecated…
JavaScript rendering
The execution of a page's client-side JavaScript by a search engine so that content and links generated at runtime become indexable.
Render queue
The deferred queue in which Google executes a page's JavaScript with a headless Chromium instance after the raw HTML has already been…
Hydration
Attaching client-side JavaScript behaviour to server-rendered HTML so a static page becomes interactive.