Crawling

Crawling is the process by which search engines discover, access, and scan web pages across the internet using automated programs called crawlers, spiders, or bots (like Google's Googlebot). These crawlers systematically browse through websites by following links from page to page, collecting information about each webpage's content, structure, and metadata. Crawling is the first essential step in how search engines build their massive databases of web content, as pages must be crawled before they can be indexed and potentially shown in search results, making it a fundamental aspect of SEO visibility.