Why Lovable Sites Don't Rank: The React SPA Problem Explained

Lovable builds beautiful sites in minutes. But Google cannot read a single word. Here is why.

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What Lovable produces under the hood

Lovable is an AI website builder that generates full React applications powered by Vite. You describe what you want, and Lovable writes the code for you. The result looks polished. It works in your browser. From a user's perspective, everything appears perfect.

But there is a fundamental architectural problem. Lovable outputs a React Single Page Application. That means the entire site is a single index.html file containing almost nothing — just a <div id="root"></div> tag and a reference to a JavaScript bundle. Every heading, paragraph, image, and button you see on screen is generated by JavaScript after the page loads in a browser.

The HTML file itself is an empty shell. There are no headings in the HTML. No paragraphs. No content of any kind. Everything lives inside JavaScript files that only execute when a browser runs them.

Navigation is another critical issue. In a standard website, links are <a href="/about.html"> tags that point to real URLs. Google follows these links to discover your pages. Lovable uses React Router, which means navigation is handled by JavaScript onClick handlers. The links look normal to a human clicking through the site, but they are not real HTML links. They are JavaScript function calls that swap components in and out of the DOM. No crawler can follow them.

This is not a minor technical detail. It is the reason your Lovable site is invisible to Google.

What Google actually receives

When Googlebot visits your Lovable site, it makes a standard HTTP request to your URL. The server responds with the raw HTML file. Here is what that response looks like:

// Server response for a Lovable site
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Vite + React + TS</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="root"></div> // ← This is ALL Google sees
    <script type="module" src="/src/main.tsx"></script>
  </body>
</html>

That is the entire page. An empty div and a script tag. No headings, no text, no links, no meta description, no structured content. The title tag often still reads "Vite + React + TS" — the default that Lovable never overrides in the actual HTML file.

Google's crawler does not open a browser. It does not execute JavaScript the way Chrome does. It reads the HTML response directly. And in this case, there is nothing to read. Your 2,000 words of carefully written copy, your service descriptions, your calls to action — none of it exists in the document that Google receives.

People sometimes point out that Google has a rendering engine that can execute JavaScript. This is true, but it operates on a secondary pass with a significantly lower priority queue. Most Lovable sites never make it through that queue because the initial HTML provides no signals that the page contains anything worth rendering. Google sees an empty page and moves on.

The ranking problem, step by step

Here is exactly what happens when Google encounters your Lovable site:

Google requests your URL. Googlebot sends an HTTP GET request to your domain, just like any browser would. It expects to receive an HTML document in return.
Your server returns an empty HTML shell. The response contains a <div id="root"></div>, a script tag, and nothing else. No text content. No navigation links. No meta descriptions specific to the page.
Google finds nothing to index. The crawler parses the HTML and finds zero meaningful content. There are no headings to extract, no paragraphs to analyze, no internal links to follow to discover other pages on your site.
Your page gets flagged in Google Search Console. You see the status "Crawled — currently not indexed." This means Google visited the page, read what was there, and decided it was not worth adding to its index. It found an empty document.
Your pages never appear in search results. Because the pages are not indexed, they cannot rank. No amount of keyword research, backlink building, or social sharing will change this. The problem is architectural. Google literally cannot see your content.

This is not a ranking problem you can fix with better keywords or more content. The content already exists — it is just trapped inside JavaScript that Google never executes.

But my Lighthouse score says 90%+

This is the single biggest misconception among Lovable users. Lovable often shows an SEO score of 90% or higher in its built-in metrics. People see that number and assume everything is fine. It is not.

That score comes from Google Lighthouse, a tool that runs inside your browser. Lighthouse opens your page in Chrome, waits for JavaScript to execute, and then evaluates the fully rendered result. It checks whether your rendered page has proper heading hierarchy, alt text on images, sufficient color contrast, and valid HTML structure. These are all real quality signals — but they measure the rendered page, not the initial server response.

Googlebot does not work this way. Googlebot makes an HTTP request and reads whatever HTML comes back. It does not sit around waiting for React to boot up, fetch data, and paint the screen. The crawler sees the raw document. And for Lovable sites, that document is empty.

A perfect Lighthouse SEO score and zero pages indexed in Google can coexist on the same Lovable site. They measure completely different things. Lighthouse measures the quality of a page that has already been rendered by a browser. Google Search Console shows you what actually got indexed. If you have a 95% Lighthouse score and zero indexed pages, your SEO score is meaningless.

The only way to know what Google sees is to view the page source — not the inspect element tool, which shows the rendered DOM, but the actual source HTML. Right-click your Lovable site, choose "View Page Source," and look at what is there. If you see an empty <div id="root"> and nothing else, that is what Google sees too.

The fix: convert to static HTML

The solution is not to add plugins, install SEO packages, or tweak meta tags inside your React components. The solution is to change the architecture. Your content needs to exist in the HTML document itself, not in JavaScript that generates it after the page loads.

This means converting your Lovable site from a React SPA into static HTML pages. Each page becomes its own .html file with all content written directly into the document. When Google requests the URL, it receives a complete page with headings, paragraphs, images, links, meta tags, and structured data — all in the initial response.

The conversion preserves your design completely. Every color, font, layout choice, and visual element stays exactly the same. The change is entirely under the hood. Your visitors will not notice any difference. But Google will see everything.

Navigation links become real <a href> tags that crawlers can follow. Each page gets its own unique title tag and meta description. Internal linking lets Google discover and crawl your entire site. Your pages start showing up in Google Search Console as indexed rather than "crawled — currently not indexed."

Static HTML also eliminates the JavaScript overhead. Your pages load faster because there is no framework to download, parse, and execute before content appears. This is a direct ranking factor. Google favors pages that load quickly and deliver content immediately.

You end up with a set of clean HTML, CSS, and minimal JavaScript files that you own outright. Host them anywhere. Edit them with any code editor. No platform dependency. No monthly subscription. Your site, your files, your SEO.

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