Akamai Integration Guide

Integrate Index Render with Akamai Property Manager to optimize your site for search engines and AI crawlers at the edge. This integration uses Property Manager rules to identify bots and route them to the pre-rendering service.

Edge Efficiency By offloading bot detection to Akamai, you ensure that crawlers receive pre-rendered HTML without ever touching your origin infrastructure.

1

Detect Crawlers

In Akamai Property Manager, create a new rule to detect bots based on the User-Agent header. Match against the following common crawler strings:

User-Agent Patterns

googlebot|googlebot-image|googlebot-video|googlebot-news|googleother|apis-google|bingbot|yandex|baiduspider|facebookexternalhit|facebookcatalog|facebot|twitterbot|rogerbot|linkedinbot|embedly|quora\ link\ preview|showyoubot|outbrain|pinterest|pinterestbot|slackbot|slack-imgproxy|vkshare|w3c_validator|redditbot|applebot|whatsapp|flipboard|tumblr|bitlybot|skypeuripreview|nuzzel|discordbot|google\ page\ speed|qwantify|bitrix\ link\ preview|xing-contenttabreceiver|telegrambot|google-inspectiontool|petalbot|duckduckbot|bytespider|gptbot|chatgpt-user|claudebot|perplexitybot|ahrefsbot|semrushbot|mj12bot|slurp

Note: If you use Akamai Bot Manager, it's recommended to use the "Bot Detection" criteria instead of a manual User-Agent match for better accuracy.

2

Set Up Origin Forwarding

When a crawler is matched, configure the rule to change the Origin Server to the Index Render API:

Origin Hostname: api.indexrender.io
Forward Host Header: Origin Hostname
Cache Key Hostname: Origin Hostname

Then, add your API Key as a request header:

Request Header

x-indexrender-key: your_api_key_here

3

Modify Request Path

Rewrite the request path using Akamai built-in variables to include the full URL of the page being requested:

Path Rewrite

/api/v1/render?url={{builtin.AK_SCHEME}}://{{builtin.AK_HOST}}{{builtin.AK_ORIGINAL_URL}}

Ensure there are no spaces in the final rewrite string.

4

Verify Integration

To confirm that your integration is active, send a request to your URL while simulating a search engine bot. Run the following command in your terminal:

Terminal

curl --location 'https://yourdomain.com' \
--header 'User-Agent: googlebot'

In the <head> section of the response, you should see the Index Render metadata tags indicating the page was successfully pre-rendered:

Expected Output

<!--IndexRender-->
<meta name="generator" content="IndexRender/65d6cde" />
<meta name="x-rendered-by" content="IndexRender/65d6cde" />
<meta name="x-rendered-at" content="2026-04-26T18:26:03.1076251Z" />
<meta name="x-render-traceparent" content="00-39f1dd04eeba1243cae01dc5c70e5b47-cdf5cfae992740d8-01" />