What It Is
Crawling is how search engines explore the web. Automated programs called crawlers, bots or spiders (Google’s is called Googlebot) visit pages, read their content and follow links to find more pages. It is a bit like a delivery driver learning a city by driving every street and noting every new address. Crawling comes first; indexing and ranking come after.
Why It Matters for Your Business
If search engines cannot crawl your pages, they cannot rank them. Problems include broken links, pages only reachable through a search box, a robots.txt file that blocks key areas or a server that is too slow or often down. A store with hundreds of product pages but weak internal links might find many products are crawled rarely or not at all.
Good to Know
Tip: link your important pages from your menu and from related pages, keep your XML sitemap current and fix broken links. Google Search Console has crawl reports that show errors and how often Googlebot visits. A reliable, fast host also helps, because crawlers slow down on sites that respond slowly or return errors.