Why your IDX website might be invisible to AI
Will Draper
Real estate marketing coach and AI search strategist
Published · Last updated
Here is a failure mode I run into constantly. An agent has good content, real expertise, and a website that cost real money. And AI cannot read a word of it.
The cause is almost always the same. The page arrives from the server nearly empty, and JavaScript fills in the text after it loads. A person never notices. A crawler on a time budget frequently gets nothing.
The thirty second check
- Open your most important page.
- Right click and choose view page source. Not inspect. View source.
- Search that source for a full sentence you know is on the page.
- If the sentence is not there, the crawler did not get it either.
Run this on your home page, your about page, and your best answer page. Those three cover most of what matters.
What to do if it fails
You usually do not need to replace your whole site. Your listing search can stay where it is. What matters is moving your written answers onto pages that ship the text in the HTML, then linking to them clearly from your navigation.
Some site builders offer a server rendering or static page option that fixes this in a setting. Ask your provider the exact question: does the page HTML contain the body text before JavaScript runs? A vague answer is a no.