Fixing uncrawlable overlay content

Why content on overlays doesn’t get crawled

Google has made significant advances in understanding web pages, but it still isn’t as effective as a regular user.

Without getting too technical about the crawling process or how Google renders JavaScript, the basic rule is that search engines don’t see content that isn’t available on the initial load. Overlays aren’t rendered on the page during the initial load to improve performance, optimize HTML output, and support animations with Motion.

As a result, any content within an overlay, whether fixed or relative, isn’t technically present on the page at first render. Consequently, it won’t be crawled or indexed (i.e., won’t impact search rankings).

Unfortunately, there’s no way to make overlay content crawlable. If you want Google to discover specific content or links, overlays are not a suitable place for them. This issue can also affect navigation bars that use overlays to hide or show links, as Google won’t detect those links.

If you have a page linked only from an overlay in the navigation bar, that page will effectively be an orphan page, with no detectable internal links for crawlers to follow.

In such cases, consider adding links to those pages in the footer, in non-overlay text, or in an HTML sitemap.