Is Lovable AI SEO Broken? A Senior Dev Weighs In…

0:00 is lovable fundamentally is lovable 0:03 fundamentally broken from an SEO 0:05 perspective what exactly is this problem 0:07 that people keep talking about can we 0:09 fix it just with prompting or is there a 0:11 more in-depth problem at the structural 0:13 level within lovable that means it can 0:15 never be fixed will this be solved by 0:17 lovable to and does any of this even 0:19 matter considering the speed at which we 0:21 can spin up prototypes and spin up small 0:22 websites we getting obsessed about SEO 0:24 when it really isn't such a big deal my 0:27 really good buddy Elliot has joined me 0:28 he is a senior Tech developer software 0:31 engineer uh he knows everything I don't 0:33 know from a technical perspective which 0:35 as we know is a lot so the problem as I 0:38 understand it and I might stick a few 0:39 tweets up at this point is that there is 0:41 something wrong with the way that client 0:43 side versus server side rendering is 0:45 handled with all lovable sites what what 0:48 does that actually mean from from a 0:49 search engine optimization perspective 0:51 when these Vibe coders generate the 0:53 websites they often rely purely on 0:55 JavaScript and single page applications 0:57 to do it and what that means is a lot of 0:59 the HML that would usually be embedded 1:01 on the website is absent and therefore 1:03 there's not much for the search engines 1:06 to pick up on right and we saw that you 1:08 told me just by viewing the source code 1:10 of or viewing the source some of the 1:12 sites I've launched you can you can see 1:13 that directly right cool okay so yeah 1:15 for instance we'd take this one which is 1:16 just a bit of a fun idea of of AI agency 1:19 West Sussex if I hit on that and and 1:22 view the page 1:23 Source you will see none of these 1:25 headings are coming across none of this 1:27 body text is actually a visible when we 1:31 get down to a 1:32 purely an SEO like in terms of what the 1:34 bot sees when it lands cuz a Google 1:36 bot's going to be doesn't actually 1:38 visually sense what the site is does it 1:40 it needs to read it at a backend level 1:43 so no good no good for a local service 1:46 business in this with SEO in mind 1:48 directly right how do we fix this so you 1:50 ask me to go away and just start trying 1:51 to fix this directly and just by asking 1:53 lovable so my thought process being that 1:56 lovable is attempting just a purely spit 2:00 out react um where it doesn't need to 2:03 for something like this maybe it would 2:05 be nice in certain context to use a web 2:08 framework but at the end of the day a 2:10 simple website like this uh what's the 2:14 website we're talking the Home 2:15 Maintenance 2:16 website uh it could just be a purely 2:19 HTML static HTML website and then we 2:21 could use something like react just to 2:23 enhance certain aspects of it right okay 2:25 so we so you asked me to do that 2:27 progressively enhanced web app it went 2:29 away and did something then you told me 2:30 to put convert my pwa into a fully 2:32 functional HTML based web page said it 2:34 did it 2:36 mhm but obviously didn't right because 2:38 when we look at the West Sussex 2:41 published page it's not actually 2:42 performed there so so it's not told me 2:45 there's a limitation there it's just not 2:46 gone ahead and added from an SEO 2:48 perspective or from a from an HDML 2:50 perspective did some stuff did a bit 2:53 yeah so what do we do from here you went 2:55 away to the git I I gave you access to 2:57 the to the GitHub yeah so just as a 3:00 proof of concept uh I followed some docs 3:03 on so lovable uses V under the hood um 3:07 what's v what is V that's a good 3:09 question 3:11 it's it's the build engine basically 3:14 that lovable uses to compile all the 3:15 JavaScript or typescript or jsx which is 3:19 what react uses um to generate your HTML 3:23 and and JavaScript and CSS from um so 3:26 yeah on the V documentation uh there's a 3:28 web page all about Serv side rendering 3:31 yes so if we can render some of this 3:33 content server side we can ensure that 3:34 it ends up in the HTML of the final 3:37 website uh and vit the build engine that 3:41 lovable uses has a really good page on 3:43 how to how to implement that yourself um 3:46 and when I say really good I mean you 3:47 can go on there and you can control a 3:49 control C control V into your git repo 3:52 and you can get as a proof of concept 3:54 something serice side 3:57 rendering um the problem I've run into 4:00 in doing that is that yes it worked as a 4:02 proof of concept and I managed to get 4:04 something service i' rendering which was 4:06 a a test string string of text yeah yeah 4:09 that I put in but the rest of the uh 4:12 generated lovable website did did not 4:14 have any textual content that ended up 4:16 on the the page 4:18 [Music] 4:21 Source we've tried to prompt engineer 4:24 our way to get V installed going as far 4:27 as to go and shove it in and then take 4:30 it go in go in so we let we let other 4:33 build a project then we came in tore it 4:36 all out shoved V in and then gave it 4:38 back to loable so here you go and it's 4:41 here trying it's trying to do something 4:42 that's amazing and look what's been 4:44 built while we were doing that and even 4:45 better version of the site and does this 4:48 use ve oh it's so cool this is this is 4:51 off the back of the ve thing I think 4:52 isn't it can you look at the the htl in 4:56 here I'm just enjoying the site right 4:58 now don't mess up the why does preview 5:00 work within here and it doesn't work 5:01 within there that's a question just just 5:03 runs within an if frame right if you 5:04 look at the source for 5:06 this or in frame source yeah view frame 5:10 the frame source and then get rid of 5:11 view Source at the 5:15 beginning what that 5:19 yeah so it works in here it's just an ey 5:23 frame but is there any is there any SSO 5:26 for this search go in there search for 5:28 2003 5:31 oh 5:33 yeah 5:36 SEO he's got 5:38 it 5:45 okay all 5:48 right 5:49 interesting so we 5:53 have effectively done 5:56 it we done it by hook or by crook 6:00 in conclusion Elliot you have 6:02 successfully with my 6:05 help got to a point that moving over to 6:08 the screen recording here we were able 6:10 to develop a website doesn't need to 6:13 look like this but it does because we 6:14 made something fun and a bit stupid 6:17 developed a website that on the back end 6:19 when you look at it H has s server side 6:21 rendering included yes amazing however 6:26 when you go to actually try and view 6:27 that site it's showing not f 6:30 and what were you just saying about that 6:32 yeah I was saying I don't I don't really 6:34 think this is an us problem I think this 6:36 is a lovable problem maybe it's not 6:38 helped by the fact that we shoehorned in 6:41 V into inside the lavables git 6:44 repo um but yeah just going off the back 6:47 of we can we can 6:50 run the eye frame that was okay so 6:55 that's come stra from here right yeah 6:56 this content all rendered in an ey frame 6:58 we've just pulled the ey frame URL out 7:00 and open it up in a browser and this 7:01 runs absolutely fine that um I think I 7:05 don't know but I'm going to I'm going to 7:07 Hazard a guess that something to do with 7:09 the way that The Lovable preview website 7:12 works we've destroyed in the process of 7:17 reverse engineer website yeah yeah but 7:21 it to a certain degree works and it 7:23 works enough that we saw the Google bot 7:25 is picking up the correct headings and 7:27 stuff so yeah interesting Okay cool so 7:29 so what does that mean for us so okay 7:32 cool so part one showed that there is 7:34 potentially something there that can be 7:35 fixed and that hopefully lovable are 7:37 going to realize this is something they 7:38 need to address now how concerning is 7:40 this if I'm using 7:43 lovable as a micro SAS business looking 7:45 to launch and build micras from within 7:48 it initially I think it's fine because 7:52 in the first section of traffic you're 7:54 going to get as it should be the case is 7:56 you go and invest in Google ads you need 7:58 to validate the Google search is the 8:01 method in which you're going to acquire 8:02 users and the quickest way to do that is 8:04 run Google ads you run the ads and build 8:06 a Content plan that will back up your 8:09 your paid acquisition and blend it with 8:11 SEO in this scenario that's not going to 8:14 work right so yeah if I'm building a SAS 8:16 within loveable at the moment the risk 8:19 is high we're hoping they can fix this 8:20 we hoping they will fix this it feels 8:22 like a no-brainer right like they going 8:23 to have to they're going to have to 8:24 address it if I was thinking at this 8:27 approaching this from a web design point 8:29 of view like oh my God now I can make 8:30 five-page websites really fast I'm not 8:33 so bothered I think this actually is a 8:34 really great effective way to launch 8:36 sites much faster and Visually much more 8:39 interesting with lead magnets and 8:41 dynamic elements on those sites that 8:42 look amazing on phones for extremely 8:44 cheaply and extremely fast in my opinion 8:48 a small business could have a five-page 8:50 website that covers Services I expect 8:52 this to be fully solved whether by 8:53 lovable or whoever whatever lovable 2 is 8:56 or whatever the next great big SAS 8:58 Builder V VI coding tool is something 9:01 will be there this will get you by this 9:03 could all change in the next two weeks 9:04 we just don't know we'll keep going and 9:06 looking around we'll keep noodling with 9:07 things see if we can find a hacky 9:09 solution but no doubt there'll be 9:10 something uh that comes up that we can 9:12 use thanks so much share what you're 9:14 building if you found something that 9:15 we've totally missed we want to know 9:16 because I want to work with this stuff 9:18 really Keen to hear from you thanks for 9:19 watching and uh yeah Elliot thanks for 9:21 coming along I know you traveled a long 9:23 way from Five Doors Down thank you mate 9:26 Cheers Cheers 9:33 oh I forgot how good this is Smokey nice 9:34 one isn't it yeah oh it's 8 and a half%