Exactly. This is one of the fundamental things that I never understood about Gemini. It's simply a "web" that doesn't support some of the features of the modern web that the author finds objectionable. I have no problem with anyone doing that or with the author's objections but they did a lot of work to do what could have simply been done with a specific set of tools and "rules" applied to the existing HTTP/HTML web.

• Create a standard for what subset of HTML standards are supported and maybe define some headers for these pages to use to enable crawlers to identify them
• Build some browsers that only support the standard subset
• Build search engines that only index pages that contain the smolweb headers defined in the standard
• ???
• Profit