Why Isn't My Next.js Site Showing Up on ChatGPT or Google?

and leave. If your pages are server-rendered or statically generated, your real text ships in the HTML and engines can read it. Key takeaways Next.js isn't inherently visible or invisible — your rendering strategy decides. Client-rendered pages can hand crawlers an empty shell; SSR/SSG ship real HTML. Hosting on a *.vercel.app subdomain also caps your AI visibility. The fix is configuration, not a rewrite. The problem Many AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. So if a key page only assembles its content in the browser, the crawler sees the shell, not your words — and you can't be cited for content a machine never read. Check it yourself: right-click → "View Page Source" (not "Inspect"). If your real headline and body text aren't in that raw HTML, your page is rendering client-side. A *.vercel.app preview subdomain compounds the problem: in our audit of 301 vibe-coded sites, shared-subdomain sites averaged an AI Visibility Score of 24.3 vs 43.8 on their own domain.

Run a free audit →

The 3-step fix Render key pages on the server. Use Server Components, SSR, or static generation (SSG) for your marketing and content pages so the real text is in the initial HTML. At minimum, your core headline and description must ship server-side. Move to your own domain and set metadata. Connect a custom domain, and use the Next.js Metadata API for titles/descriptions plus JSON-LD structured data. Add an llms.txt. Serve a plain-text llms.txt from your root pointing to your key content — an emerging, optional convention that's easy to add. Check your Next.js site in 60 seconds Not sure whether your pages render server-side? Paste your URL into SearchAudit and we'll show you exactly what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews receive from your Next.js site — and the specific fix for each gap. Free, about 60 seconds, no signup, no credit card. Run a free audit — get your AI Visibility Score (0–100), the category breakdown, and the exact issues to fix. About 60 seconds, no signup, no credit card.