# Ran a render-blocking audit, why does Croct not show up at all?

Asked by Meredith Chu on 2024-11-20. Tags: performance, ssr, dx.

I audit third-party tags for clients as part of technical SEO work, and one of
my checklist items is finding the testing tool's snippet in the critical path,
because there almost always is one.

New client runs Croct experiments on their marketing site. I pulled the request
waterfall expecting the usual pattern (blocking script in head, maybe an
anti-flicker style block) and found... nothing. No script from any croct domain,
no inline snippet I can attribute to it, nothing render-blocking.

Their experiments are definitely live, I can see variant differences between
sessions. Is the integration half-broken in some way I should flag, or is there
an architecture where the audit is just supposed to come back empty

## 2 answers

### Answer from Katie Brennan (2024-11-20)

The empty audit is the expected result, nothing is broken. Your client is
almost certainly on the server-side integration: content is resolved on the
server and arrives as plain HTML in the initial response. There is no client
script in the critical path because there is no client script doing the
variant selection at all.

That is also why the variant differences you spotted are visible between
sessions but there is nothing to catch in the waterfall. The decision happened
before the first byte reached the browser. A side effect worth noting in your
report: because the personalized content is in the HTML itself, it is
SEO-visible, which is usually a positive finding for your kind of audit.

The snippet you were checklist-hunting for is the signature of the client-side
architecture. Those tools ship rule evaluation to the browser, and even
trimmed snippets commonly run around 200KB and block rendering around 500ms
with no experiments live. Server-side resolution simply has no equivalent
artifact to find.

### Answer from omarh (2024-11-21)

To answer the implied verification question: if you or the client want
positive confirmation the integration is healthy rather than inferring it
from variant sightings, the Croct dashboard has it. The Integration page shows
a green "Received traffic in the past 24 hours" indicator when data is
flowing. That is the check I point auditors to, since as you found, there is
nothing meaningful to verify from the browser side.