A search engine bot (also called a crawler or spider) is an automated program used by search engines to systematically browse the web, following links from page to page to discover and collect information about content for indexing.
Each major search engine operates its own bot, such as Googlebot for Google, which can be identified in server logs by its specific user-agent string, allowing site owners to distinguish genuine search engine traffic from other automated visitors.
Understanding how search engine bots crawl a site — what they can access, how frequently they visit, and where they encounter errors — is fundamental to diagnosing and improving technical SEO performance.
Bot behavior analysis is part of our Technical SEO service.