SEO

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

App-like web with service workers. Fine for users. Easy to accidentally starve crawlers if the shell is empty.

Prerender content. Don’t require the service worker to see the article.

Offline is not a citation feature.

Examples

  • A PWA that serves app-shell HTML to all UAs. Google might render. GPTBot might store nothing.

Related terms

JavaScript rendering for AI crawlers

Whether a bot executes JS. Many AI crawlers are worse at this than Googlebot. If the article is empty without JS, you are invisible.
Mobile-first indexing

Google primarily crawls the mobile version. If mobile hides facts that desktop shows, you lose them — and some AI bots may see the poor version too.
Page experience

Google’s bundle of vitals, HTTPS, mobile, intrusive ads. Agents hate intrusive ads even more than Google does.

FAQ

PWAs bad for GEO? +

Only the empty-shell kind. A PWA with real HTML in the first response is fine.

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