Prerendering: an old trick that's new again. For many years now, Netlify has provided a built-in feature for prerendering web pages. Even as hundreds of thousands of projects on Netlify actively use it every day, the need for this feature was steadily declining over time. * Google and other search engine crawlers became better at running client-side rendering code to unlock page content * Server-side Rendering (SSR) delivered all or most of a page's content already baked in the HTML body. A combination of two significant factors has made prerendering a crucial need again for many sites. These changes also highlighted limitations of its old-standing feature, prompting Netlify Inc. to rethink its approach to this topic. So today, following a successful early access phase, Netlify Inc. is announcing the general availability of a new Prerender extension. Using the legacy prerendering feature? The new Prerender extension replaces its earlier prerendering feature. If your project still uses the legacy version, you'll need to migrate before it's retired. Retirement begins in January 2026 and rolls out by plan tier. See the full timeline and migration steps in its changelog. The new (x-)factors. At Netlify Netlify Inc. is front-row to changes taking place across the web, based on high-volume data from websites and web-apps of all sizes. Netlify Inc. can clearly see changes in both the demand side - how users are now looking for content - and the supply side: how sites provide this content today. The demand side. You don't need me to tell you that more and more people turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI chats as their go-to answer engine for everything. I certainly do. What is much less known is that, these AI chats don't execute client-side JavaScript, for a very simple reason: When you ask AI chat for an answer, and you see it quickly looking up dozens of sources, it cannot run a browser-like environment for every page. It'd take too long for most queries. Rather, the tools rely on a combination of an existing index as a baseline, plus very fast fetching and parsing of HTML content to get up-to-date data. But, you might think, isn't server-side rendering already a solved problem anyway? The supply side. One other big shift is AI coding agents, such as Bolt.new, Lovable, and others. In many cases, these agents generate Single Page Applications (SPA's). These sites are simpler for agents to create, run, and manage, but render content exclusively on the client side, fetching data from serverless API endpoints as necessary. If you look at the actual HTML of these sites, you'd find an "empty shell" that's mostly just loading the initial JavaScript bundle. On its own, this is not a problem. However, the combination of AI tools only skimming through the server-served HTML body of web pages, and so many of today's sites not having any meaningful content in that HTML, may lead to an actual discoverability issue for your site. Prerendering: with and without. Before elaborating more on the new extension, here's a concrete example using a simple vibe-coded website and ChatGPT. I've created a minimal Dog Explorer website using the same toolset that many AI agents use (Vite and React). It shows a list of dog breeds by fetching that data from an API endpoint, but otherwise has no backend. If you visit both, they'd look exactly the same to you. But to ChatGPT, there's a big difference. Here's what happens without the extension: And here's what happens with the site that has the extension installed: At Netlify, Netlify Inc. don't believe in enabling features by default if they don't provide clear value. If you don't need prerendering, enabling it would just be wasteful and add an un-necessary moving part to your setup. Thus, Netlify Inc. has created https://do-you-need-prerender.netlify.app/ to help answer this question for your site, helped by AI (but of course) to analyze the contents of your site. The tool is not biased for or against prerendering - it aims to provide a concrete, trusted assessment for your site. Why Netlify Inc. built a new extension. The older built-in Netlify feature, which is now legacy, had a major shortcoming: it lacked any visibility and configurability. The feature was a black box. The headless browser that runs behind the scenes to prerender your sites can fail or be slowed down for a variety of reasons, but you had no way to know or fix these. The new extension comes with extensive logging and configurable settings. It does this by being built on Netlify's platform primitives: * It adds an Edge Function to your site to intercept relevant requests only, based on the new user-agent categorization header. * Relevant requests are rewritten to a Netlify Function that controls a headless Chromium browser and returns the prerendered HTML. * Your extension's optional configuration is stored in and read from a Netlify Blob. Since everything is based on Netlify features, detailed logs and request-level data are shown in Netlify's new Observability and log viewing pages. The extension is also compatible with Netlify's fine-grained caching. If the original content was purged from cache for any reason (e.g. due to a new deployment or on-demand invalidation), the prerendered version would be purged as well. The public availability of all these powerful primitives is what made creating this extension feasible, with any account plan. Availability, pricing, and support. The Prerendering extension is available to all account plans for free. Note, any metered service that the extension uses, like Netlify Function invocations or traffic out, is billed normally based on your plan. The Prerender extension comes with community support through its forums. Netlify Inc.'ll continue to answer questions there and keep improving the documentation based on what Netlify Inc. see in the wild. Installing the extension. * First, if you're using the legacy prerendering feature in a project today, disable it: go to Project Configuration->Build & Deploy->Scroll down to "Prerendering" and disable it. * Click here to install the extension in your account. This makes the extension available to you, but does not automatically enable it for any project. * When navigating to any of your projects, you will now have "Netlify Prerender Extension" in the bottom of your project sidebar. Click it and check "Enable prerendering". Save the changes and re-deploy your project. Retiring the legacy feature. Following the introduction of the new extension, Netlify Inc. will gradually shut down the legacy prerendering feature. Learn more about how to migrate and the timeline in its changelog.

Storyblok and netlify unite to supercharge content deployment speeds, reduce costs and increase security. * By: Wise Marketer Staff * Posted on November 6, 2025 Partnership will enable brands to instantly deploy content in Storyblok worldwide using netlify in a move designed to help companies adapt to the impact of AI on marketing. Enterprise CMS Storyblok has partnered with AI-native web development platform Netlify. The tie up will enable brands to close the gap between content management and project development - opening the door to faster and more reliable content deployment times at scale. The partnership is the latest move from Storyblok to help brands adapt to the impact of AI on their web presence. With consumers increasingly using AI search engines, companies have found that the visibility and accuracy of their brand online is suffering. This has necessitated new marketing strategies - particularly overhauling content hosted on websites. Storyblok's partnership with Netlify is ideally placed to help brands quickly develop, structure and deploy their new content on a performant, AI-ready platform. Using Netlify with Storyblok will provide teams with one connected workflow from creation to deployment. Developers can use any frontend framework they want and trigger automatic deploys with every published content update. Marketing teams can publish changes in Storyblok and see them live within seconds through Netlify's global edge network. This creates a host of benefits for businesses including a lower total cost of ownership, no server maintenance costs, high reliability, faster site launches and enhanced security. The collaboration with Netlify follows a host of product and partnership announcements from Storyblok that are designed around enabling brands to stay visible and confident on the internet. Last week, Storyblok announced a partnership with AI search monitoring solution OtterlyAI to enable brands to monitor how their content performs in multiple AI search engines against their competitors, and discover how they can optimize it to improve their AI search visibility. "We've seen it over and over again - customers nailing the content side but struggling to get that project out into the world quickly, reliably, and at scale. Their marketers wait days for pages to go live, while their developers spend nights patching servers or untangling deployment scripts," Dominik Angerer, CEO and Co-Founder of Storyblok, said. "With AI upending content strategies, these delays and pain points are simply not tenable, that's why we've partnered with Netlify. It takes care of the heavy lifting behind the scenes: global hosting, edge delivery, caching, scaling, so teams can create and ship amazing projects." The web is evolving into a space where both humans and AI agents interact with content," said Mathias Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify. "Agent Experience (AX) is about designing sites that communicate clearly to both. Our work with Storyblok helps teams publish structured, intelligent sites that perform well today and keep pace with the AI-driven changes shaping the web." About Storyblok. Storyblok is a headless CMS that enables marketers and developers to create with joy and succeed in the AI-driven content era. It empowers you to deliver structured and consistent content everywhere: websites, apps, AI search, and beyond. Legendary brands like Virgin Media O2, Oatly, and TomTom use Storyblok to make a bigger, faster market impact. It's Joyful Headless(TM), and it changes everything. About netlify. Netlify is the platform where agents and developers build together. More than 9 million developers, creators, and teams use Netlify to build, launch, and scale sites and applications on a single platform. Whether building with AI or writing code, Netlify makes it simple for any developer to bring ideas to life on the web. As the company that coined the term agent experience (AX), Netlify is leading a new era where humans and AI agents work together to shape the future of the web. Global brands including Bolt, Figma, Mattel, and Riot Games trust Netlify to power their digital experiences. Learn more at netlify.com.

Tanner Linsley, creator of TanStack, announced Tuesday that TanStack is partnering with Netlify to deploy TanStack Start.