SEO glossary · C

Crawler

What is a Crawler?

A crawler, also called a spider or bot, is a program that search engines use to find and read web pages. It fetches a page, follows the links on it to find more pages, and passes what it finds on so the pages can be indexed.

Well-known crawlers

  • Googlebot: Google’s crawler, which mainly crawls as a smartphone.
  • Bingbot: Microsoft’s crawler for Bing.
  • AI crawlers: such as GPTBot (OpenAI) and ClaudeBot (Anthropic), which collect content for AI models and assistants.
  • SEO crawlers: tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb that crawl your own site to find technical problems.

Helping crawlers find your pages

  • Link to every important page from other pages on your site.
  • Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
  • Use robots.txt to keep crawlers out of areas with no search value.
  • Keep the site fast and free of server errors, so crawlers can fetch more pages.

Crawlers identify themselves with a user agent name, which you can see in your server logs.

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