IT Glossary
What is a web crawler?
The robot that roams the web from link to link and reads pages — Google’s eyes on your website.
Before anyone finds your website on Google, a robot visits it: the crawler (Googlebot being the most important one) hops from link to link, reads pages and sends them on for indexing — and if it cannot see a page, that page does not exist for search, however beautiful it may be. From this follows a simple rule for your company’s website: everything you want found must be reachable by the robot — connected through internal links, listed in the sitemap, not blocked in robots.txt (the rules file for robots) and rendered without technical acrobatics that crawlers read poorly. The classic cases of invisible pages: products no link points to, content appearing only after JavaScript interactions, sections accidentally blocked during a migration. The landscape has its dark side too — robots that copy content or probe for vulnerabilities — plus a new reality: the crawlers of AI models (GPTBot and its relatives) have become important readers, and allowing them access is a strategic decision — visibility inside AI answers traded against content given away for free. For a business, crawlability is the cheapest marketing prerequisite there is: whatever the robot misses, no customer will ever search their way to.
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Why it matters for your business
Full visibility in search
A properly crawlable site has all its valuable pages in Google’s index — not just the homepage and three lucky others.
Access errors come to light
Search Console shows what the robot could not read — blocked pages, errors, broken redirects — before they cost you rankings.
Control stays with you
Through robots.txt and meta rules you decide what robots read: private sections stay hidden, commercial content sits in the shop window.
Frequently asked questions
How do I see which pages Google has read on my site?
Google Search Console, free of charge: the indexing reports show pages discovered, indexed and rejected, with reasons — and the URL inspection tool tells you exactly how the robot saw a specific page, up to date.
What is robots.txt, and can I break something in it?
A text file at the site root containing rules for robots: what they may read. And yes, it can break things spectacularly — a “Disallow: /” forgotten from launch has wiped entire sites out of Google; check it at every migration or relaunch.
Should I let AI crawlers (GPTBot and the like) onto my site?
A business decision, not a technical one: granting access means a chance to be cited in AI assistants’ answers — traffic and visibility — while blocking protects your content from being used for training. For commercial sites that want to be found, the trend leans toward allowing access, with monitoring.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247