Guide
How search engines see your website
A browser paints pixels for a person. A search engine does something narrower: it downloads your source, may run your scripts, extracts text and links, and decides what to store. Understanding those stages is most of technical SEO.
1. Crawl — downloading the source
A crawler requests your URL with its own user-agent and downloads the raw HTML — exactly the bytes your server sends, before any JavaScript runs. At this stage what matters is the response status, whether a robots rule blocks the fetch, redirects, and whether your important content and links are present in that first response.
You can see this stage directly: fetch a URL with the analyzer and read the source view. Everything there is available to every crawler on the first pass.
2. Render — running the page
Modern crawlers can execute JavaScript and build a rendered DOM, then extract text and links from that. This is where single-page apps and client-side content live. If a heading, paragraph, or link only appears after scripts run, it exists only in the rendered view — and only for crawlers that render, when they get around to it.
The JavaScript SEO checker diffs source against rendered so you can see precisely which words and links depend on JavaScript, and how large that share is.
3. Index — the part no tool can reproduce
After crawling and rendering, the search engine decides whether and how to store the page: it deduplicates, picks a canonical, weighs signals, and may choose not to index at all. This process is private, changes constantly, and is not observable from outside. No third-party tool — including this one — reproduces it.
For the real index state of a page you own, use Google's own URL Inspection in Search Console and the Rich Results Test.
What to check first
- Does the source already contain your title, main heading, key text, and internal links?
- Is the response a clean 200 with no unexpected redirect or
noindex? - If content depends on JavaScript, does it still appear in the rendered view?
- Are your internal links real
<a href>elements, not script-only click handlers?
The honest limit again: this site faithfully shows crawl and render. It never claims to reproduce Google's Web Rendering Service or its ranking and indexing decisions. Not affiliated with Google or Bing.