# React SPA invisible to AI search — GEO fix — ADN

← Back to Learn You shipped a React SPA. Lighthouse scores look fine. Google Search Console shows indexed pages. But when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your product, your company does not appear.
 The problem is not SEO. The problem is what machine visitors receive .
 The empty shell problem
 A typical client-rendered app returns HTML like:
 <div id="root"></div>
<script src="/assets/main.js"></script> Browsers execute the script and render your UI. Most AI crawlers and answer-engine fetchers do not. They tokenize the initial response — which is an empty div and a script tag.
 Your pricing page, feature list, and value proposition literally do not exist in what they read.
 Why meta tags are not enough
 Open Graph tags and JSON-LD in the head help social previews and some search features. But answer engines quote body content . A meta description is 160 characters. Your landing page is 2,000 words of persuasion that never arrives.
 Who is affected
 • Answer engines (Perplexity, ChatGPT browse, Bing Copilot) — fetch on user query, no JS execution
 • Training crawlers — bulk-fetch HTML, rarely execute scripts
 • IDE agents — scrape docs and marketing sites for context
 Googlebot is the exception — it runs JavaScript, slowly. AI discovery channels are not.
 Fixes that do not require a rewrite
 Approach Effort Agent impact
 Full SSR/SSG migration High Fixes root cause
 Prerender service Medium Static HTML snapshot
 Agent-friendly gateway Low Serves Markdown from ingest pipeline
 Parallel /docs in Markdown Low Gives agents a readable surface
 ADN's gateway extracts and serves clean Markdown for answer_engine and live_fetch classes — without touching what Googlebot receives (passthrough) or what humans see in the browser.
 Measure before you fix
 Run the free scan at https://www.agent-delivery.network/#scan on your marketing URL. If extractable text is a fraction of page weight, you have the empty-shell problem.
 For SaaS teams where one AI-referred lead pays for the year, fixing discoverability is often the highest-ROI growth work you can do without a product change.
 Frequently asked
 Does Google index SPAs? Googlebot can execute JavaScript, but with delays and quotas. AI answer engines and most training crawlers do not — they see the initial HTML shell, which is often empty.
 Do I need to rebuild my app as SSR? Not necessarily. An agent-friendly gateway can serve clean Markdown extracted from your rendered content, or from a parallel content source, without changing your frontend.
 See how this applies: Small SaaS guide .
 Continue reading
 HTML vs Markdown: what AI crawlers actually cost you
 Agent-friendly vs agent-ready: why we don't sell a score
 Run the free scan on your URL to see what AI receives today.
 Ask ADN