Crawling and Indexing

Crawling and Indexing are the foundational processes by which search engines and AI answer engines discover and organize the content of the internet. Crawling is the process which bots (crawlers) discover and read pages using links. Indexing is the subsequent process of storing and organizing that content in a massive database.

Why It Matters

Ensuring your site has content that can be easily crawled is critical for visibility; if a page isn't crawled and indexed correctly, it cannot be ranked, cited, or referenced by search or AI systems. No index means no visibility. To avoid this, you must ensure: 

1. ‍XML Sitemaps are clean, so you don't waste "Crawl Budget" on useless pages with no content, ensuring the bots spend their time reading our high-value content.
2. Robots.txt is not configured to block crawlers from reaching your content
3. Pages have the right Heading Structure (H1, H2, H3)
4. Do not store important content in PDF or Images

We ensure visibility by

We check the "Coverage" report in Google Search Console weekly to ensure that all our content is indexed. If some articles are not indexed, look at the number of visitors; if it's above a certain threshold, we revisit that piece of content and rewrite it.