Google CONDITIONAL gate — critical content locked behind client-side JS gates indexing for new low-authority sites; high-authority sites are largely fine; the bite is concentrated where it hurts most

Claim: Critical content (text, links, canonical, structured data) that only appears after client-side JS execution depends on Google's render-queue completing. This is a conditional gate — it bites reliably for new, low-authority sites with no crawl-priority cushion, and is much less reliable as a binary failure mode for established high-authority sites.

The evidence split:

• Vercel/MERJ July 2024 (high-authority, vendor-incentive flagged): "100% of HTML pages" rendered successfully, median delay 10 seconds — see Vercel + MERJ July 2024 rendering study — analyzed 100,000+ Googlebot fetches; 100% HTML pages rendered; median delay 10s, p75 26s, p90 ~3h, p95 ~6h, p99 ~18h; VENDOR INCENTIVE FLAGGED + high-authority test sites.
• Onely November 2022 (brand-new zero-authority test subdomain): JavaScript-dependent link discovery took 9× longer than HTML — see Onely November 2022 experiment (Ziemek Bućko) — brand-new zero-authority test subdomain; JS-folder page 7 took 313 HOURS vs HTML 36 hours (9x slower); first link 52h vs 25h — different stage (discovery, not render) but the high-authority/low-authority contrast is the point.

The favourable numbers come from established sites; the punishing numbers come from a new domain. New sites — exactly the population Candid serves at launch — sit in the harder regime.

Source: Compass_artifact research synthesis of Google docs + Vercel/MERJ + Onely studies.

Confidence: Industry-consensus / Verified. Grade A/B.

Caveat: "Conditional gate" is a useful framing. Candid's default (Next.js with SSG/SSR) sidesteps the problem; the risk re-emerges if a contractor builds a CSR React SPA for the marketing pages. See Rule: SSR or SSG is the DEFAULT for any content that must be indexed; CSR for indexable content is a GAMBLE whose downside lands hardest on new low-authority sites.