What is an Indexing Crawler?
An indexing crawler—also known as a search engine bot, spider, or web crawler—is an automated program used by search engines to discover, read, and analyze content on websites and web pages across the internet.
Its primary function is to scan websites and gather information that is then stored in the search engine’s index, allowing those pages to appear in search results when users perform queries.
How Does an Indexing Crawler Work?
Indexing crawlers operate by visiting a webpage, analyzing its content, following links to other pages, and continuously repeating this process to discover new or updated content across the web.
The process generally involves:
Crawling – The bot visits a web page and reads its HTML content.
Parsing – It extracts key elements such as titles, metadata, internal/external links, and text content.
Indexing – If the content is valuable and permitted, the crawler sends the data to the search engine index for future retrieval in search results.
If you want to learn more about Google Bot, read here.