You shipped a React SPA. Lighthouse scores look fine. Google Search Console shows indexed pages. But when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your product, your company does not appear. The problem is not SEO. The problem is what machine visitors receive.
The empty shell problem
A typical client-rendered app returns HTML like:
<div id="root"></div>
<script src="/assets/main.js"></script>Browsers execute the script and render your UI. Most AI crawlers and answer-engine fetchers do not. They tokenize the initial response — which is an empty div and a script tag.
Your pricing page, feature list, and value proposition literally do not exist in what they read.
Why meta tags are not enough
Open Graph tags and JSON-LD in the head help social previews and some search features. But answer engines quote body content. A meta description is 160 characters. Your landing page is 2,000 words of persuasion that never arrives.
Who is affected
• Answer engines (Perplexity, ChatGPT browse, Bing Copilot) — fetch on user query, no JS execution
• Training crawlers — bulk-fetch HTML, rarely execute scripts
• IDE agents — scrape docs and marketing sites for context
Googlebot is the exception — it runs JavaScript, slowly. AI discovery channels are not.
Fixes that do not require a rewrite
| Approach | Effort | Agent impact |
|---|---|---|
| Full SSR/SSG migration | High | Fixes root cause |
| Prerender service | Medium | Static HTML snapshot |
| Agent-friendly gateway | Low | Serves Markdown from ingest pipeline |
| Parallel /docs in Markdown | Low | Gives agents a readable surface |
ADN's gateway extracts and serves clean Markdown for answer_engine and live_fetch classes — without touching what Googlebot receives (passthrough) or what humans see in the browser.
Measure before you fix
Run the free scan at https://www.agent-delivery.network/#scan on your marketing URL. If extractable text is a fraction of page weight, you have the empty-shell problem.
For SaaS teams where one AI-referred lead pays for the year, fixing discoverability is often the highest-ROI growth work you can do without a product change.