Intercrawl and Prerender.io
Both serve crawlers a rendered copy of a JavaScript site. How each one recognises crawlers, keeps its cache and charges, from each service's own pages.
Last checked 21 October 2026
Prerender.io and Intercrawl do the same core job. When a search engine or AI crawler asks for a page of a site built with JavaScript, they answer with the page as a browser shows it after its scripts ran, and visitors reach the site as before. This page sets out where the two differ. What it says about Prerender.io comes from Prerender.io's own pages, listed under Sources with the date each was read.
At a glance
| Prerender.io | Intercrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| How a crawler is recognised | By "the user agent string in the incoming request" | By the user agent, and the IP address against the operator's published ranges where they exist |
| Statuses kept in the cache | 200 only; other statuses are served and not cached | 200, 301, 308, 404 and 410 |
| Cache lifetime | Set per account: 24h to 7 days (Starter), 12h to 14 days (Growth), 6h to 30 days (Pro and Enterprise Plus) | 7 days, and a new render when the page changes (below) |
| A page with no stored copy | Rendered during the request; "This first render may take several seconds" | Rendered during the request; after 10 seconds the crawler gets your own page |
| Re-cache API | POST https://api.prerender.io/recache, up to 1,000 URLs | The same request format at https://render.intercrawl.com/recache, up to 1,000 URLs |
| Installs | At the CDN (Cloudflare or Akamai, for example) or in your backend | A file for Next.js, Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare; connecting Vercel or Cloudflare with no code; DNS mode; or Prerender's own middlewares |
| Price | From 59 USD a month (Starter, 30,000 renders); Starter is free for 30 days | Free during the 14-day trial, and free after it until paid plans open |
Recognising crawlers
Prerender.io's page on how it works describes recognising crawlers by "the user agent string in the incoming request". Its Node.js middleware (prerender-node 3.8.3) lists AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot among its default user agents, and Prerender.io publishes a list of 38 recommended AI crawler user agents that customers can add.
Intercrawl also starts from the user agent. Where the crawler's operator publishes the IP addresses it crawls from (Google, Bing, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Apple do), each request is checked against them, and a request that names Googlebot from any other address gets your own page, as a visitor would. See How serving works and the crawler list.
The cache
Prerender.io keeps rendered pages for the expiration set on the account, within the range its plan allows, and renders them again when a URL expires, when you ask from the dashboard, or through its re-cache API. It stores only 200 responses; a 301, 302 or 404 is served to the crawler and rendered again on the next request.
Intercrawl keeps a render for 7 days and serves it while a new one is made after that. It also renders a page again when its scripts, stylesheets, title, description or canonical change (checked at most once an hour per page), when your sitemap gives it a newer lastmod, and when you call the re-cache API. Permanent redirects (301 and 308), 404 and 410 answers are kept like any other page.
What Intercrawl also does
Intercrawl was built to show what each crawler actually received, not only to serve it:
- A daily audit of up to 100 pages of each site fetches every page as a visitor, as Googlebot, as GPTBot and as ClaudeBot, and compares each crawler's view with the visitor's: status, visible text, links, title and canonical. See Audits and alerts.
- For any page, the crawler's text and HTML next to the visitor's, with the differences marked, and on request a picture of the HTML that crawler received.
- Alerts by email, Slack or webhook when a crawler starts getting less than a visitor, and a monthly report you can share without the Intercrawl name. See Reports.
- A free scan of up to 100 pages on the home page, no account needed.
Prerender.io's pricing page lists "AI Insights" and "Search Performance" among its plan features; this page does not compare them, as the pages read do not describe them in detail.
Price
Prices as listed on Prerender.io's pricing page, in US dollars a month:
| Plan | Price | Renders included | Extra renders |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 59 | 30,000 | 2.25 per 1,000 |
| Growth | 169 | 100,000 | 1.75 per 1,000 |
| Pro | 419 | 500,000 | 1.50 per 1,000 |
| Enterprise Plus | Custom | 1M and more | Custom |
Every plan lists unlimited domains. Intercrawl is free during the 14-day trial and stays free after it until paid plans open, with one site per account until then. Paid plans and their prices in US dollars will be shown before anyone is asked to pay; see the Terms.
Moving from Prerender.io
Prerender's middlewares can send their requests to Intercrawl by changing two settings: the service address and the token. Move from Prerender.io has the steps for prerender-node, nginx and the other middlewares, and for the re-cache API.
A note on rendering for crawlers
Google calls serving crawlers a rendered copy (dynamic rendering) "a workaround and not a recommended solution", and recommends "server-side rendering, static rendering, or hydration" instead. It also says that "Googlebot generally doesn't consider dynamic rendering as cloaking" as long as it "produces similar content". Both services render for crawlers. If your site can render on the server, that is the better fix; Intercrawl's audits are there to show the crawler's copy matches what visitors get.
Intercrawl does not promise any ranking, indexing or citation by an AI answer, and neither does this comparison.
Sources
Read on the dates shown (UTC). Prices and features change; if anything here is out of date, write to hello@intercrawl.com.
- Prerender.io pricing, read 2026-10-21
- How Prerender.io works, read 2026-10-21
- How Prerender caching works, read 2026-10-21
- Prerender.io API, read 2026-10-21
- Recommended AI crawler user agents, read 2026-10-21
- prerender-node source, version 3.8.3, read 2026-10-21
- Google Search Central: dynamic rendering as a workaround, read 2026-10-21