Crawling

Crawling is the process by which search engine bots — such as Googlebot, Bingbot, or other web spiders — systematically discover and download web pages by following hyperlinks from known URLs. The crawled data is then processed and stored for indexing. Google's crawling process is managed by the Googlebot software.

Crawl behavior is configured via robots.txt directives, meta robots tags, and sitemaps submitted through Google Search Console. Screaming Frog and Ahrefs Site Audit replicate crawling to identify issues such as broken links, redirect chains, and crawl traps that hinder Googlebot's ability to index a site effectively.