Transcript:

Hey everyone, I’m Chris with Nectiv, and for today’s GEO tip, we’re going to talk about AI crawlers and their inability to access JavaScript content.

This was a great study done by Versil a while back where they analyzed different AI crawlers. What they found was that crawlers like ChatGPT and Claude cannot access JavaScript. They may fetch the JavaScript files, but they cannot actually execute them.

That means if your content relies heavily on JavaScript, AI crawlers aren’t going to be able to see it, and you’re going to limit your visibility in both AI search and traditional SEO.

Quick Example: Uniqlo

On the Uniqlo site, they load all of their content on their international subdomains using JavaScript — it’s client-side rendered.

• On their French site, if you turn JavaScript off, none of the content loads.

• I tested this in ChatGPT by asking:

  “Can you read this page? Don’t read any others — just this one.”
  It used the search function to try to access it — but it couldn’t fetch the content.

Then I switched to a US version of the site (which does not rely on JavaScript) — and ChatGPT could access it just fine.

Why This Matters

If you’re building your site like Uniqlo — relying heavily on JavaScript for content delivery — you’re likely limiting your visibility within LLMs, AI search platforms, and even traditional SEO.

Best Practice

To maximize visibility:

Serve your content in the original HTML whenever possible.

That’s going to ensure your content is accessible to AI crawlers like ChatGPT, Claude, and others — and position your brand better for inclusion across both AI-driven and traditional search experiences.