Crawling / SEO Terms Crawling Crawling is the process by which search engine bots, also known as crawlers or spiders, systematically discover and scan websites across the internet. During crawling, these bots follow links from one page to another, gather content and metadata, and send this information back to the search engine’s index. This process is the first step in determining whether and how a page appears in search results. When a search engine crawls a website, it looks at the structure of the site, the text content, HTML tags, images and other page elements. Crawlers begin with a list of known URLs and follow internal and external links to find new or updated pages. Site owners can influence how crawling works by submitting XML sitemaps, maintaining clean site architecture, and using a robots.txt file to allow or restrict access to specific pages. Crawling frequency and depth depend on a site’s authority, update schedule and technical health. Proper crawling is essential for search engine optimisation. If important pages are not crawled, they cannot be indexed or shown in search results. Common issues that affect crawling include broken links, blocked pages, slow site speed, duplicate content and complex navigation. Tools such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog and Ahrefs can help monitor crawling activity and identify problems that may prevent content from being discovered. A well-optimised site encourages more frequent and efficient crawling, leading to better indexing and stronger visibility in organic search.