Did you ever want to validate to see if Google or other search engines can see your tabbed (hidden in a tab) navigation or content? Well, John Mueller from Google listed some ideas on how to do so.
The question came from Remy Sharp who asked on Bluesky:
Curious: is there any real world research showing that (Google and other) SEO crawlers can navigate JavaScript (or even separately CSS based) tab systems? i.e. to expose the initially hidden tab and navigate it (perhaps if there's links inside the tab panel)
Here is John's response:
AFAIK none of these click on things to discover DOM elements that load additional content under the same URL. If content in a tab is loaded in the DOM, then it could be indexed (though imo it's still a bad practice if it's not immediately visible to users - they'll just bounce).You can verify how Google sees the "HTML" / DOM of a page by using the Inspect URL tool in Search Console. And for anything that loads with separate URLs, make sure to use a elements rather than just onclick handlers, so that the URLs can be discovered for separate crawling.
We have a lot of this documented at developers.google.com/search/docs/... - Martin also has a bunch of videos on the topic too. Vercel looked at search engines & JS in vercel.com/blog/how-goo... , for AI/LLM "crawlers" it doesn't look that JS-friendly though.
If it's loaded in the DOM on page load, theoretically it can be indexed. There's disagreement in the SEO community about how well it will "rank", but imo the bigger issue is that it's easy to confuse users: they might expect something (shown in search), and will go elsewhere if they don't see it.
It's like making a really long page - theoretically the text on the bottom could be found in search, but if a user explicitly wants information like that, they might choose to bounce instead of digging for it. Make it easy for users to want to stay.
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
