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.

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Annabelle Cochrane

Managing Director / SEO Strategist

Annabelle is a qualified marketing specialist with over 6 years of hands-on experience providing service-based businesses with real, tangible, out-come based SEO campaigns. 

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The Complete SEO Audit Checklist

The Complete SEO Audit Checklist

An SEO audit sounds like it should require expensive tools and years of experience. Most of it doesn’t — a genuinely useful first-pass audit is a checklist you can work through yourself in an afternoon, covering the handful of issues that actually move the needle. Here’s that checklist, organised the

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How to Do Keyword Research: A Practical Guide

How to Do Keyword Research: A Practical Guide

Keyword research gets treated like a mysterious skill, but the actual process is straightforward: find out what your customers are genuinely searching for, work out which of those searches are realistically worth targeting, and build your content and site structure around the answer. Here’s how to actually do it. Step

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GEO vs SEO vs AEO: What's the Actual Difference?

GEO vs SEO vs AEO: What’s the Actual Difference?

Three acronyms, one underlying shift: search results increasingly answer the question directly instead of just linking to a page that might. GEO, SEO, and AEO all describe some part of adapting to that shift, and the terms get used inconsistently enough that it’s worth a straight, side-by-side explanation. The Short

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