PSA: your dispensary might pay for SEO and your product menu can STILL be invisible to Google

A buddy asked me to look at his dispensary's site recently, and it's worth a gut-check for anyone running an online storefront in this industry.

The site looked done. Weekly blog, decent design, an agency already on retainer. The kind of site that reads as "handled."

Then I checked whether Google could actually see the product menu. It couldn't. Hundreds of products, and a search for the shop pages turned up almost nothing on Google, zero on Bing.

Turned out the menu rendered entirely through JavaScript. Turn off JS in your browser and watch — if the menu disappears, so does it for most crawlers.

Add to that: duplicate H1 tags, placeholder text left in live headings, and most images missing alt text. None of it visible to a customer. All of it an invisible-to-search signal.

The scary part is that this business was already paying an SEO agency (not naming names). The agency wasn't totally incompetent — they had schema in place, decent page titles. But general SEO playbooks don't know where cannabis-specific landmines are: menu integrations that render client-side, compliance limits on product copy, weird handoffs between the ecom platform and the main site.

Quick check anyone can run: Google "site:yourdomain.com/shop" with your actual shop URL. If your product count doesn't show up, that's your answer.

Curious if anyone else here has hit this with their menu platform — Dutchie, Jane, Treez, or otherwise.