Turn off JavaScript and look at your homepage

November 2009. I was one of the first reporters on scene at Fort Hood. And what I remember most isn’t the reporting. It’s standing next to a live truck praying the mast would go up.

You can have the story of the year. If the signal doesn’t go out, you have nothing. That lesson transfers exactly.

Here’s what almost nobody has re-audited: Googlebot renders JavaScript. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot do not. GPTBot downloads JavaScript files about 11.5% of the time and never executes them. So if your site is a client-rendered React or Vue app, and a lot of beautiful agency-built sites are, you aren’t ranking poorly with AI crawlers. You’re invisible. Not degraded. Blank. And your SEO report looks fine, because Google can see you, which gives everyone false confidence.

Same category of failure: plenty of robots.txt files still wildcard-block anything from OpenAI or Anthropic. Those companies now run separate bots for training and for search. Blocking ClaudeBot opts you out of training. Blocking Claude-SearchBot opts you out of being found at all.

We found this on our own site. thestorytellingcollab.com was a React build that served eight words of text to anything that couldn’t run JavaScript. Eight. We were the storytelling firm telling nobody anything. We rebuilt it before we ever sold the fix to a client, and it is now the first thing we check in an audit. That’s the standard here: we don’t recommend work we haven’t already done on ourselves.

Turn off JavaScript and load your homepage. If the page goes blank, so does your AI visibility, and the fix is two days of engineering. Check the robots file while you’re in there. That one takes ten minutes.