The links your crawler can't see

There are two versions of most modern pages: the HTML the server sends, and the DOM the browser builds after running JavaScript. A crawler that reads only the first sees a different, smaller web.

Search and AI crawlers vary widely here. Some fetch the raw HTML and never execute a line of script; others run a full headless browser. A link added to the page by JavaScript — a button that navigates, a menu built at runtime, an infinite-scroll list — simply does not exist for the first group.

This page contains exactly one such link. It is not in the HTML you were served; a small script adds it below once it runs. A rendering crawler will follow it. A non-rendering one will report this page as a dead end.

The same asymmetry decides whether your best content is discoverable at all. If it lives behind a click that only JavaScript wires up, half your readers-of-record never reach it.