GEO courseModule 3 of 10: Can AI Reach You?Lesson 3.3
Can AI Read and Quote Your Pages? JavaScript, Widgets and Snippet Settings
Three quieter ways to be invisible: key facts that only appear after a script runs, settings that stop search engines quoting your page, and Google's new switch that removes a whole site from its AI answers.
Why it matters
Facts that load by script, or pages tagged "don't quote", look fine to people and are blank to many AI tools.
The evidence
Evidence: Official guidance
Google's and Microsoft's documented controls, plus one large study of crawler logs. "AI crawlers don't run scripts" is the best current evidence, so re-check it from time to time.
Do this first
On a listing and your fees page, View page source and search for the price, a fee and your phone number.
01What it is
Some books arrive with the pictures printed; others arrive as a box of pieces that only some readers can build. And some come with a sticker saying “you may show the title but not read it out”. If the sticker’s on by mistake, nobody quotes you.
Think of it like
A shop window whose display only lights up when you press a hidden button. People who know about the button see everything. Passers-by see a dark window.
02Why it matters
To the people searching
Your visitors' browsers run scripts, so everything looks normal to them. But when they ask an AI about your fees or a property, it may only have seen a heading, a photo and an empty box.
buyers
If listings and search load by script, AI can't quote your prices, bedrooms or areas.
tenants
Rents, deposits and availability in a widget may never reach an AI answer.
sellers
A fees calculator with no plain text beside it gives AI nothing to quote.
landlords
Landlord guides tagged "nosnippet" by a plugin are indexed but can't be quoted.
To Google, Bing and AI
Evidence: Official guidanceJavaScript: Google renders scripts, but a Vercel and MERJ study of real crawler traffic (December 2024) found the crawlers from OpenAI and Anthropic fetched script files without running them. Microsoft warns that answers hidden in tabs, scripts or images may be missed. Snippet settings: Google says nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit what can appear, and its AI features need a page that's allowed a snippet. Bing's guidelines (rewritten February 2026, as reported) say NOARCHIVE keeps a page out of Copilot answers and NOCACHE limits Copilot to the title and snippet. The new switch: since 31 August 2026, Search Console has a site-wide setting (Settings, Search generative AI) that can exclude your whole site from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It's on (included) by default. Google says it isn't used for ranking elsewhere in Search.
- Script files that OpenAI's and Anthropic's crawlers ran in the Vercel study. They fetched them but didn't run them
- 0Script files that OpenAI's and Anthropic's crawlers ran in the Vercel study. They fetched them but didn't run them
An agent example
A branch's listing pages look perfect, but the price, description and tenure are loaded by a script from the CRM. View page source shows only a heading and a photo. The branch asks its provider for server-rendered pages and, as a stopgap, writes its fees and contact details as plain text on the page.
03Your turn
Check yours, then fix it
- 1Open a listing, right-click and choose View page source.
- 2Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for the price, the first line of the description and your phone number.
- 3Repeat on your fees page and a landlord guide.
- 4If something is on screen but not in the source, a script puts it there.
- 1In Chrome, press F12, then Ctrl+Shift+P, type "Disable JavaScript" and press Enter.
- 2Reload your key pages. Whatever disappears is at risk.
- 3Close the developer tools to switch it back on.
- 1In View page source, search for noindex, nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noarchive.
- 2Keep only the ones you meant: private, temporary or thank-you pages.
- 3For the whole site at once, Screaming Frog's Directives tab lists them.
- 1In Search Console, open Settings, then Search generative AI.
- 2Check your site is included (the default).
- 3If it's excluded, find out who changed it and why before changing it back.
Here is the page source of a property page. Is the key content (price, bedrooms, fees, address, phone number) in the raw HTML, or added later by JavaScript? Are there any robots or snippet directives, and what would each one stop?
- 1Tell your developer or provider exactly which pages failed the view-source test.
- 2Ask for server-side rendering (or static generation) for listings, fees, valuation and guide pages.
- 3Ask them to re-run the test and send you a screenshot of the source showing the price.
- 1Next to a fees calculator, write the fee rules in text.
- 2Next to a reviews widget, write your rating and review count, with the date.
- 3Replace iframes that carry important facts with real text on your own page. An iframe is someone else's page, so the credit may go to them.
- 1Fix them at the template level in your SEO plugin (guides, tag pages, authors), so new pages don't inherit them.
- 2Keep a short register of pages that are meant to be hidden.
- 3Request indexing on the pages you fixed.
- 1Put essential facts (fees, address, services) in a standard text block, not a dynamic widget.
- 2If the problem is theme-wide, raise it with your theme or host support.
- 1Check the platform's help for a pre-rendering or static setting.
- 2Keep key facts in standard text elements, not apps, galleries or custom code blocks.
Then: Re-run the view-source test after every fix, and again after any redesign or plugin update. These settings drift.
04Keep it up
Check after any rebuild, theme change or plugin update, and glance at the Search generative AI setting each quarter.
That's lesson 3.3
Worked through it? Mark it done and we’ll keep track on this device.
← Back to 3.2 Indexed in Google and Bing: Sitemaps, IndexNow and Internal Links