Pages whose primary content was JavaScript-rendered (visible only after hydration) were retrieved less often by RAG-based LLMs than equivalent server-rendered pages.
We mirrored 6 SPA pages as prerendered HTML on the same domain. Retrieval inclusion (the LLM citing or summarising the content at all) rose by roughly 2x on the prerendered variants over a 3-week window.
Methodology
Same content, two delivery modes; LLM probe on 15 queries weekly.
Limits of this finding
Crawler behaviour differs across LLM providers; the trend was consistent but the magnitude varied.
More Technical findings
Removing JSON-LD that contradicted visible page content lifted Rich Results Test pass rates and removed manual-action risk in the 9 cases we audited.
Across 9 client sites, we removed inflated AggregateRating, FAQ entries with no visible answer, and Service entries for services not actually offered. Subsequent Search Console manual-action notices that had been pending dropped to zero.
Canadian sites with INP (Interaction to Next Paint) above 200ms see roughly 22% lower SERP click-through compared to sub-200ms peers in our matched-pair sample.
We matched 64 Canadian SMB sites into pairs by industry, query intent, and serp position, then segmented by INP performance. The sub-200ms cohort had a mean CTR of 4.1%; the >200ms cohort 3.2% — a roughly 22% relative gap. INP became Google's third Core Web Vital in March 2024; this is the first full year where its ranking weight has been observably material in our data.
Only 18% of top-50 Canadian agency websites we audited implement Organization, Person, and Article schema together — the configuration we observe most strongly correlates with AI engine citations.
Hand-audited the top 50 ranking Canadian SEO agency websites for schema coverage. 84% had Organization schema. 47% had FAQPage. Only 18% had the trifecta of Organization + Person (author) + Article schema deployed consistently. In our citation-probe data, the trifecta cohort received roughly 2.6× the LLM citations of the partial-coverage cohort.
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