> I assume Google would have to penalize sites that render something completely different to their bot, or else bait and switch would be rampant? That's correc

> I assume Google would have to penalize sites that render something completely different to their bot, or else bait and switch would be rampant? That's correct. They call that "cloaking" when you render different content for a crawler than for a normal user. Google is rewarding sites for making the UX better for the end user. > Can't the backend basically throw its hands up and render a trivial (e.g. "reader mode" text view) version We're actually experimenting with this approach in a couple of different ways. One approach we're testing now is using AWS Lambda to render a fairly static version of the page using puppeteer. So far the results are promising as the page is true to what the end user would see (except for client-side logic / AJAX requests) and it renders much quicker than the standard experience with all the analytics/JS libraries we use.