FAQ
Questions engineering teams ask before booking the call.
31 answers across 6 categories. Each answer is short on purpose — if a question needs a deeper response, link to the relevant article in the blog or service page.
Category
Product and scope
What Prerendering.com actually does and what kinds of problems we work on.
What does Prerendering.com do?
- Prerendering.com is a technical SEO and rendering engagement for engineering teams shipping JavaScript-heavy sites. We diagnose why JS sites lose search and AI-engine visibility, ship the fixes, and stay involved through release QA and incident response.
Is this a SaaS product?
- No. Prerendering.com is an audit and engineering engagement, not a self-service tool. We work directly with engineering teams. Many of our clients use a SaaS prerendering layer (Prerender.io, Rendertron, Cloudflare prerendering) alongside our audits.
What stacks do you work with?
- Mostly Next.js, Remix, Astro, Nuxt, Vue, React Router SPAs, and headless CMS architectures. We also work with sites where the rendering stack is fragmented across multiple frameworks. Stack-specific failure patterns are part of the audit findings.
Who is the typical client?
- SaaS, marketplaces, publishers, and fintech companies with JS-heavy sites where indexation, crawl efficiency, or AI search visibility is blocking growth. Engineering team sizes range from a 5-person startup to a 200-person platform team.
Do you do content SEO or link building?
- No. We are technical SEO only — rendering, crawl, indexation, structured data, AI search readiness. We routinely partner with content and link teams, but we do not write articles or run outreach.
Category
Pricing and engagement
How fees are structured, what the engagement looks like, and what to expect commercially.
Why is there no public price list?
- Technical SEO scope scales with route inventory, stack complexity, and existing problem depth. A fixed price list would be wrong for most teams. The scoping call sizes the work honestly before any commitment. See the pricing page for engagement structure.
Do you offer fixed-fee audits?
- Yes. The Technical SEO Audit tier is always quoted as a single fixed fee after the scoping call. The fee is based on route-family count and stack complexity, not on hours. There are no surprise overages.
Do you bill hourly?
- No. Audits are a fixed fee. Engagements are quoted per project. Ongoing retainers are a monthly fee with a defined scope. Hourly billing creates the wrong incentives for both sides — we avoid it.
What payment terms do you support?
- Audits and engagements are typically 50 percent on signature, 50 percent on delivery. Retainers bill monthly in advance. Bank transfer (US/EU) and credit card supported. Net-30 is available for established companies on request.
How does pricing compare to Prerender.io?
- Prerender.io is closer to infrastructure — you pay a per-render rate. Prerendering.com is an engineering engagement — we diagnose and ship fixes. The two pair well: a SaaS prerendering layer for the rendering capacity, an audit-led engagement for the strategy and the implementation around it.
Category
Implementation and process
How audits and engagements actually run, deliverables, and the engineering hand-off pattern.
What do you actually deliver?
- A prioritized findings document with engineering-ready tickets, rendering and route-family analysis, structured data and AI extraction review, and a 30-minute walkthrough call. For engagements: PR-ready specs, implementation pair-coding, post-deploy validation, and a handoff doc.
How long does a technical SEO audit take?
- Most audits take 2 to 4 weeks from kickoff to delivery. Larger marketplaces or sites with mixed-stack rendering take longer. Engineering engagements typically run 4 to 12 weeks. Ongoing retainers are month-to-month.
Do you write code or just review it?
- Both, depending on the engagement. Audits stop at PR-ready specs. Engagements include pair-coding, PR review, and direct implementation alongside your team. We do not take over a codebase and disappear — we hand off to internal ownership.
What happens after delivery?
- A 30-minute walkthrough call clarifies findings and prioritization. Many teams move into an engineering engagement to ship the fixes. Others handle implementation internally and come back for the next audit. We track outcomes for 30 days post-deploy at no additional cost.
Do you sign NDAs?
- Yes. NDAs are standard before sharing any site-specific details. Mutual or one-way both work. We can also work under your standard MSA if your legal team prefers — we have no preference on contract framework, only on scope clarity.
Do you work with teams outside one timezone?
- Yes. Most engagements are async-friendly. Synchronous touchpoints are scheduled around your team. We have shipped engagements across US/EU, EU/APAC, and fully distributed-team timezones.
Category
Rendering and prerendering
What prerendering is, when it helps, and how it interacts with SSR / SSG / ISR decisions.
What is prerendering?
- Prerendering generates static HTML snapshots of JavaScript-rendered routes, served to crawlers and (sometimes) users. It closes the gap between client-rendered apps and crawler-facing HTML without forcing a full SSR rewrite. See the prerendering guide for the full breakdown.
When does prerendering help?
- When the JS app does not render meaningful HTML before crawlers move on, when AI engines (which often skip JS entirely) cannot extract content, when SSR is too costly to run for the full route inventory, or when a migration would take longer than a prerendering layer to roll out.
When is SSR or SSG a better answer?
- SSG wins when content is mostly static and rebuilds are fast. SSR wins when content is per-request and the team has cache discipline. Prerendering is the right answer mainly when the JS app already exists and the team needs crawler-facing HTML without rewriting the rendering pipeline.
Is prerendering the same as cloaking?
- No. Cloaking serves materially different content to crawlers vs users — Google explicitly forbids it. Compliant prerendering serves the same semantic content as a static snapshot for performance reasons; this is allowed and documented in Google guidelines.
Do AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity see prerendered HTML?
- Yes, in most cases — they prefer it. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and most AI crawlers either do not execute JavaScript or do so with strict timeouts. Prerendering produces the deterministic HTML these crawlers can extract reliably.
Category
AI search and visibility
How AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other answer engines see your site.
What is AI search visibility?
- Inclusion in AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Grok. It depends on crawler reachability, deterministic HTML, structured data, entity clarity, and content that answer engines can extract confidently into a citation.
How is AI visibility different from traditional SEO?
- Traditional SEO targets rankings on a SERP. AI visibility targets inclusion in a generated answer. The technical foundation is the same — crawlable HTML, structured data, semantic clarity — but the content shape (clear answers, citation-ready facts) and the measurement (citation share, not rank) differ.
Does llms.txt help with AI visibility?
- A little. llms.txt is a hint file for AI crawlers, similar in spirit to robots.txt. Most major AI engines do not enforce it strongly yet. It is worth shipping for forward compatibility, but it is not a substitute for crawlable HTML and structured data.
Which AI engines actually crawl my site?
- OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Bingbot (Microsoft Copilot, partly Grok), Applebot-Extended, and others. Each has different rendering capabilities — Bingbot executes more JS than most, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot generally do not. See robots.txt for the full crawler list we explicitly support.
How do I measure AI visibility?
- Track citation rate per AI engine for a curated query set, plus referral traffic from AI sources. Tools like Profound and Otterly help. Beyond tools: read the actual AI responses for your branded and category queries on a recurring schedule and log presence vs absence.
Category
Compliance and data
Privacy, data handling, contracts, and security posture.
How do you handle our data during an audit?
- Audit data (URLs, logs, GSC exports, repository access if granted) is stored in scoped engagement workspaces, not shared across clients. Access is least-privilege. Data is deleted on engagement close unless retention is contractually required. See the privacy policy for full detail.
Do you require repository access?
- Sometimes. Read-only access accelerates rendering analysis and structured data review for engagements; not strictly required for audits where curl-level analysis suffices. We never push code to a repo without explicit per-PR review.
Are you GDPR-compliant?
- Yes. We operate from the EU and follow GDPR for all client data. Data Processing Agreements are available on request and are part of the standard EU client onboarding. US clients can also request a DPA for cross-border data flows.
Do you offer SOC 2 or equivalent attestations?
- Not currently as a standalone attestation; for clients with strict compliance requirements we can scope an engagement that maps onto your existing controls (vendor security questionnaires, access reviews, deletion logs). Discuss the requirements on the scoping call.
Can you sign our standard MSA / DPA?
- Yes, in most cases. We have signed many standard enterprise MSAs and DPAs. If your contract has unusual clauses (e.g., unlimited liability, IP assignment of pre-existing tooling), expect a brief redline negotiation.
Question not answered here?
The scoping call is the right place for site-specific questions. 30 minutes, no slides, just the rendering and SEO context relevant to your stack.