How to check whether a string contains a substring in JavaScript?

Another alternative is KMP (Knuth–Morris–Pratt).

The KMP algorithm searches for a length-m substring in a length-n string in worst-case O(n+m) time, compared to a worst case of O(n⋅m) for the naive algorithm, so using KMP may be reasonable if you care about worst-case time complexity.

Here's a JavaScript implementation by Project Nayuki, taken from https://www.nayuki.io/res/knuth-morris-pratt-string-matching/kmp-string-matcher.js:

// Searches for the given pattern string in the given text string using the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm.

// If the pattern is found, this returns the index of the start of the earliest match in 'text'. Otherwise -1 is returned.

function kmpSearch(pattern, text) {
  if (pattern.length == 0)
    return 0; // Immediate match

  // Compute longest suffix-prefix table

  var lsp = [0]; // Base case
  for (var i = 1; i < pattern.length; i++) {
    var j = lsp[i - 1]; // Start by assuming we're extending the previous LSP
    while (j > 0 && pattern.charAt(i) != pattern.charAt(j))
      j = lsp[j - 1];
    if (pattern.charAt(i) == pattern.charAt(j))
      j++;
    lsp.push(j);
  }


  // Walk through text string
  var j = 0; // Number of chars matched in pattern
  for (var i = 0; i < text.length; i++) {
    while (j > 0 && text.charAt(i) != pattern.charAt(j))
      j = lsp[j - 1]; // Fall back in the pattern
    if (text.charAt(i) == pattern.charAt(j)) {
      j++; // Next char matched, increment position
      if (j == pattern.length)
        return i - (j - 1);
    }

  }
  return -1; // Not found
}

console.log(kmpSearch('ays', 'haystack') != -1) // true
console.log(kmpSearch('asdf', 'haystack') != -1) // false