Googlebot crawling is the process by which Google’s web crawler systematically browses the internet to index website content. It helps ensure web pages appear in search results by regularly updating Google’s database with new or updated pages.

Google Search Central has published the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast titled ‘How Googlebot Crawls the Web’.

The GSC team says, “In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin and Gary from the Google Search Relations team take a deep dive into how Googlebot and web crawling work—past, present, and future. Through their humorous and thoughtful conversation, they explore how crawling evolved from the early days of the internet, when scripts could index a chunk of the web from a single homepage, to the more complex and considerate systems used today. They discuss the basics of what a crawler is, how tools like cURL or Wget relate, and how policies like robots.txt ensure crawlers play nice with web infrastructure.”

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