Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know there’s an AI coding revolution happening—what Andrej Karpathy named vibe coding.
In simple terms, it means using natural language to prompt AI tools like Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and v0 to generate code for you. In this short guide, I’ll share my experience using Lovable from an SEO perspective.
What SEO Elements Are Included by Default?
I’ve been using Lovable for months, and noticed that they are gradually improving its default SEO friendliness. When you simply prompt Lovable to build a website, it will currently create by default:
- A robots.txt file
- Meta tags (title, description, author)
- OpenGraph tags (for sharing on platforms like Facebook and X)
While that is an improvement over their initial version, it’s still far from the level of SEO optimization you’d typically get with a WordPress site. However, there is one simple method you can try.
Enhancing SEO with Specific Prompts
The method is to give Lovable SEO-specific prompts. You should prompt Lovable with “Follow SEO best practices”, and it will generate:
- Schema markup
- Keyword tag
- Canonical tag
- Favicon tags
That’s definitely a bit better. However, we still need a sitemap. If you prompt Lovable with “Create a sitemap”, it will generate a sitemap.xml file.
With that, the basic SEO elements of the website are set up.
Connect to Google Search Console
The next advisable step would be to add your website to Google Search Console to benefit from all the insights. You should also submit your sitemap.xml there.
CSR vs. SSR: The Big Challenge
After doing all that, you’ll face the biggest challenge that coding with AI tools currently presents. Lovable websites use CSR (Client-Side Rendering) by default, but for better SEO, you need them to use SSR (Server-Side Rendering). With SSR, search engines can easily crawl and index content without relying on JavaScript execution.
A typical framework that enables SSR on Lovable would be Next.js, but according to Lovable’s official FAQ, Next.js is “not yet available.” However, they hint that SSR-capable frameworks may be supported in the future.
Getting to SSR
So, how can you get a site with SSR? I see two main options right now—you can do it yourself or with the help of a developer:
- Convert your website into a WordPress theme, with the interactive part integrated as a plugin (using Cursor)
- Convert the site from Lovable’s default CSR setup (Vite/React) into a SSR one with Next.js (using Cursor)
Key takeaways
- Leverage all relevant prompts in the AI builder to get the website more SEO friendly
- Aim for SSR to maximize performance and indexing
- Strategize how to implement SSR effectively
