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SEO Boost serves a pre-rendered HTML version of your pages to web crawlers. Most Bolt sites are built with JavaScript, which web crawlers and social platforms can’t run directly. They need an HTML version to read your content and generate link previews. When a crawler visits your site, SEO Boost renders the page and serves that HTML version instead of your JavaScript app. SEO Boost is available with a paid plan.

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What SEO Boost covers

  • Search engine indexing: Search engines can read HTML right away, but they need extra time to render JavaScript before they can index it. That delay can slow down how soon your pages show up in search results. Because SEO Boost serves HTML directly, crawlers can read and index your content without waiting to render JavaScript.
  • Social media previews: SEO Boost lets you set custom metadata on your pages, which gives you control over the title, description, and preview image shown when you share the link on social media. Bolt adds a basic social image and card setup to some projects, but it may not add full coverage. Set your own metadata so your previews are complete and match your preferred text and images, instead of falling back to the defaults Bolt generated for your project.

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Before you start

Connecting a custom domain is required. Setting custom metadata is strongly recommended to control how your site appears in search and social media previews.

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Connect a custom domain

You need a custom domain to turn on SEO Boost. If you’re using a free .bolt.host domain, you won’t see the SEO Boost option in your settings. You can use a custom domain purchased through Bolt or one you own and have connected to your project.

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Set up your site title, description, and image

Bolt adds a basic social image and card setup to some projects, but it may not add complete SEO or social coverage. Before turning on SEO Boost, ask Bolt to set the exact metadata you want so you control how your site appears in search results and social previews. You have to upload your preview image and favicon. You can ask Bolt to add the following:
  • A page title and description
  • Open Graph tags (for Facebook, LinkedIn, and most other platforms)
  • Twitter/X card tags
  • A canonical URL
  • Structured data
  • Standard HTML anchor links between pages
Prompt Bolt in the chatbox to set up your SEO metadata:
  1. Upload your preview image and favicon so Bolt can reference them.
  2. Ask Bolt to add SEO metadata to your site. Use one of the example prompts below to get started.
  3. If your site has more than one page, repeat for each page.
Bolt will add the right tags to your project. You can ask Bolt to update your tags at any time. Example prompts: For your whole site: Add SEO metadata to my site. The title is [your site title] and the description is [a short description]. Use the images I uploaded for the preview image and favicon, and add Open Graph tags, Twitter/X card tags, and a canonical URL. For individual pages: Add SEO metadata to the [page name] page. The title is [your page title] and the description is [a short description].

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Turn on SEO Boost

SEO Boost is turned off by default. To turn it on:
The Domains & Hosting settings panel in Bolt, with the SEO Boost option turned off.
  1. At the top of your screen, click the gear icon, then click All project settings.
  2. Click Domains & Hosting.
  3. Click Enable SEO Boost.
To turn it off, follow the same steps and click Disable SEO Boost.

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Check what crawlers are seeing

Bolt doesn’t have a built-in crawler preview, but you can use these external tools to see what search engines and social platforms are actually seeing:
  • Facebook Sharing Debugger: Go to the Facebook Sharing Debugger, log in, and enter your URL. This shows you how your page renders as a social preview and lets you force a re-scrape.
  • Google Search Console URL Inspection: In Google Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool to request an on-demand index check and see Google’s rendered view of your page.
  • curl with a Googlebot user agent: If you’re comfortable using a terminal, run the following command to see the raw HTML that SEO Boost serves to Google: curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://yourdomain.com

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Custom pre-render tools

Bolt only supports SEO Boost for pre-rendering. It can’t run custom pre-rendering workflows or tools like react-snap.

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Troubleshooting

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My site isn’t showing up in Google after turning on SEO Boost

Search indexing takes time after you turn on SEO Boost. Use Google Search Console URL Inspection to request indexing for your pages and check their status. If Google shows your page as blocked or not indexed, first check that your site is published and your custom domain is connected. If everything looks good there, ask Bolt: Check that no pages have a noindex meta tag. If the project has a robots.txt file, check that it doesn't block crawlers.

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My social preview is showing wrong or outdated content

A social preview can look out of date if the cache is stale. Two separate caches can cause an outdated preview:
  • Bolt’s pre-render cache stores each rendered page for 24 to 48 hours. It refreshes on its own once the stored version expires.
  • Social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn keep their own copy of your preview from the first time someone shared your link, and they show that copy until you ask them to fetch your page again.
To refresh the preview on a social platform right away, use the tool that platform provides:

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Google shows my site as noindex even though my code says indexing is set up

This is a known issue with SEO Boost on Next.js App Router projects. Currently, we recommend turning off SEO Boost for Next.js projects.