My Lovable site looked finished. Google could read one language out of four

I often say that Lovable is great for the first version of a website. On RoboHub, a robot comparison catalog I built last week, I saw exactly where that first version ends, so here is the breakdown: what Lovable did well, what I had to redo, and how long it took.

What the first version had

Lovable built the catalog in a few hours. Filters by category, payload and runtime, a page for every robot, a comparison table that highlights the best values, a quote form, four languages. Good enough to show a client.

The problems showed up when I asked what a search engine would see. The whole point of the site is search: someone types which robot to buy and lands on a comparison. There were several issues.

The language lived inside the page, not in the address. The switcher changed the text but the URL stayed the same. For Google that is one page in one language. The Russian, German and Chinese versions did not exist for search, even though users could see them.

No sitemap, no structured data. A sitemap tells a search engine which pages exist. Structured data tells it that a page is a product with a price and a maker. Without it, rich results and AI search answers are harder to get into.

The data looked right but was wrong in places. A London startup was listed as Russian. Two robots that are not for sale had prices. Prices in rubles had no source. None of this breaks the site, but for a catalog that wants to be trusted it is worse than any bug.

What I changed

Data first. I built a dataset of 106 models from open sources and added a link and a date to every price. If there is no number, the site says so. Only 51 models turned out to have a public price, and that became content in itself: a buyer should know a warehouse robot cannot be bought in one click, only by quote.

Then I wrote a staged brief for Claude Code and gave it the repository. Lovable and GitHub stay in sync, so Claude Code's changes appeared in the Lovable project right away, and reached the live site only when I pressed Publish. That works as a safety switch: until I check a stage, the live site does not change.

What Claude Code did:

• a separate address for each language (/ru, /de, /zh) with hreflang tags
• a sitemap with 912 addresses, product and breadcrumb markup
• category pages and head-to-head comparison pages
• a five-question robot finder
• free-license photos from Wikimedia Commons with an authors page

How long it took

One week from idea to the published version. The first Lovable version took a few hours of that. Most of the time went into market research, the dataset and checking each stage.

What to take from this

If you build a Lovable site that has to bring traffic from search, check three things before launch. Does every language have its own address. Is there a sitemap and structured data. Where do the numbers on the pages come from. The first two take a day to fix. The third takes the longest, and nobody will do it for you.

The catalog itself is still unfinished: the quote forms do not send anywhere yet and 88 of the 106 models have no photo. The full story of the project is in the RoboHub case in my work section.

FAQ about SEO on a Lovable site

Does Lovable handle several languages for search by itself?

Not in my case. The first version switched the text inside the page and kept the same address, so three of the four languages did not exist for Google. Each language needs its own address and hreflang tags, and that is a deliberate piece of work rather than a setting.

What is a sitemap and does a small site need one?

A sitemap is a file that lists every address on the site so a search engine does not have to stumble on them. RoboHub ended up with 912 addresses across four languages. For a few pages you can live without it; for a catalog it is the difference between being crawled and being guessed at.

What is structured data and why does a catalog need it?

It is machine-readable markup that tells a search engine the page is a product with a price, a maker and a status. Without it you are unlikely to appear as a rich result in Google or to be quoted by an AI search engine.

How long does it take to fix the SEO of a Lovable site?

The addresses, the sitemap and the markup were about a day of work. The data took far longer: rebuilding the catalog from open sources and finding a source for every price was most of the week.

What should a catalog do when there is no reliable price?

Say there is no data. On RoboHub only 51 of the 106 robots have a public price at all, and the rest are sold by quote. Writing that down is more useful to a buyer than a number nobody can check.