01The brief
Buckets came on as an SEO client in September 2026 alongside Beekon Light and Blended Barbers. The app itself works well; the question was why a site about finding pickup games didn't show up when people searched for exactly that.
02What I found
Baseline crawl #74 covered the home page, the create-a-game flow and the player portal: 16 findings — 3 critical, 4 high, 9 medium. Every route serves the same 1.6 KB shell with an empty root element, so the real content exists only after JavaScript runs; there is no sitemap (the app answers /sitemap.xml with the home page), and no structured data. The head tags — title, description, Open Graph — are actually decent; the body is what's missing. Every page was captured as a safety net before anything changes.
03The plan
Prerender or server-render the public routes so the HTML carries real text; publish a real sitemap and robots file; add SportsEvent and Place structured data so games are understood as games; give each route its own canonical and Open Graph tags; then run the AI-visibility baseline so ChatGPT and friends can name Buckets when someone asks where to find a pickup game. Nothing ships without the client's approval — that gate is permanent — and the pinned baseline is what the after gets measured against.