I build my own sites with AI tools, and after launching a couple of them I wanted a simple answer: can ChatGPT actually read them?

So I took 30 live sites built with tools like Bolt and Lovable, fetched each homepage the way most AI crawlers do (one plain HTTP request, no JavaScript), and looked at what came back.

Why the raw HTML matters

Most AI-built sites are single-page React apps. The server sends a nearly empty HTML file, and the browser builds the page after JavaScript runs.

That's fine for people. It's fine-ish for Google, which renders JavaScript, just later and less reliably than plain HTML. But a December 2024 study by Vercel and MERJ found that none of the major AI crawlers they observed render JavaScript, including OpenAI's, Anthropic's and Perplexity's.…