Will my SEO survive going headless?

Yes — if you SSR (server-side render) the storefront. Static-site generation (SSG) or SSR via Next.js / Nuxt 3 / Astro produces fully-rendered HTML at the edge. Googlebot sees the same HTML a user does. Lighthouse scores typically improve (LCP from 2.5s → 0.8s on a good edge deploy).

The dangers:

• Pure CSR (client-side rendering only) is a SEO death warrant. Don’t.
• URL drift — if the new frontend changes URL structure, you lose rankings. We do a pre-migration crawl + 301 redirect map.
• Hreflang / canonicals must be re-implemented on the frontend. Magento’s built-in tags don’t carry over.

Every headless build we ship includes a Screaming Frog pre/post crawl + URL parity report.