What is Prerender?
Prerender renders JavaScript-heavy pages into static HTML on behalf of site owners, helping search engines, AI crawlers, and social platforms access their content. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Prerender visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/89.0.4389.82 Safari/537.36 Prerender (+https://github.com/prerender/prerender) |
| Operated By | Prerender |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Website configuration |
| Used for AI Model Training | No |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Indirectly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
Why Is Prerender Visiting My Website?
Prerender is rendering a URL queued by your Prerender.io integration, sitemap, cache settings, dashboard, or API.
Should I Block Prerender?
Usually no if your organization uses Prerender.io, because blocking Prerender stops pages from being rendered or refreshed. Exclude unwanted URLs through your integration or Prerender.io's cache rules instead. For context, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Prerender.
Insights for Prerender
As of October 29, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Prerender?
Prerender renders a site's JavaScript pages into static HTML for search, AI, and social crawlers. It fetches pages queued by the site owner's Prerender.io integration or cache settings rather than crawling for its own purposes.
Does Prerender Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Not directly. Prerender.io says its renderer does not read robots.txt. Your integration determines which URLs it receives. Use integration filters or Prerender.io's ignored URL rules to exclude pages.
Is Prerender Used for AI Model Training?
No. Prerender renders pages for other crawlers and does not collect content for AI model training.
Does Blocking Prerender Affect AI Search or Citations?
Yes, indirectly. If your site relies on Prerender.io to serve rendered pages to search and AI crawlers, blocking Prerender can prevent those pages from being rendered or refreshed for indexing.
Does Prerender Access Private Content?
No. Prerender.io receives URLs without cookies or authentication headers, so it sees only content available to an unauthenticated visitor.
How Can I Verify a Request From Prerender?
Agent Analytics tracks Prerender pageviews. Compare the requested URLs with your Prerender.io Cache Manager, and use reverse DNS or IP verification because user-agent strings can be spoofed.