Googlebot cannot render Taboola’s recommendations.

Why?

• Taboola’s code is Client-Side Rendered (CSR).
• Taboola blocks access to its recommendations by robots.txt directive.

Taboola’s Code is Client-Side Rendered (CSR): Taboola’s recommendation system is implemented on the publisher’s client-side. Meaning, it is necessary to fetch and render the resources that serve the content. While modern search engines are able to render javascript to some extent, they must first be able to fetch the resources that will enable them to render the content.

Robots.txt directive: All links (sponsored and organic) redirect through an intermediary Taboola sub-domain. On that domain, there’s a Robots.txt directive that blocks all of Taboola’s resources, as recommended by Google in their sponsored content guidelines. See also Taboola’s compliance with sponsored content policies.
Because the recommendations are pulled from that blocked sub-domain, bots cannot fetch those recommendations, and therefore cannot render them.

How can we test that?

There are several tools that let us have a sneak peek into the way Google renders pages on the web.

There are several tools/ways to see what content is rendered by Googlebot:

• Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool (Requires Google Search Console Access)
• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
• Google’s Rich Results Test
• Google’s Cache