What Is Googlebot?
Googlebot is the web crawler Google uses to discover, crawl, and process pages across the internet for inclusion in its search index.
How It Works
Googlebot follows links from page to page, downloading and rendering content (including executing JavaScript where needed) to understand what each page contains. It operates as two main types — a mobile crawler and a desktop crawler — with the mobile version now used as the primary basis for indexing most sites under mobile-first indexing.
How to Manage What It Can Access
Site owners can guide Googlebot’s behavior through robots.txt rules (blocking specific paths from being crawled), meta robots or X-Robots-Tag directives (controlling indexing on pages it does crawl), and XML sitemaps (pointing it toward the pages that matter most). Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report shows exactly how Googlebot has been interacting with your site.


