Crawling: How Search Engines Discover Pages
Search engines use automated software, often called crawlers or bots, to discover pages on the internet. These crawlers follow links from page to page, and they may also use sitemaps and other signals to find new content. In technical disputes, it can matter whether crawlers were able to reach certain pages at all.
For example, a misconfigured robots.txt file or blocked resources can prevent crawlers from accessing important sections of a site. When this happens, those pages may never appear in search results, which can be a central issue in traffic loss cases.
Indexing: What Gets Stored and Considered
Once a page is crawled, the search engine decides whether to index it. Indexing is the process of adding the page to the search engine’s database so it can be considered for search results. Pages may be excluded from the index if they are blocked, marked as “noindex,” or considered near-duplicate versions of other pages.
In legal matters, indexing explains why some content appears in results while other material does not, even if both are publicly accessible on the web.