Index Crawling — How Search Engines Discover Your Site

Index crawling is the process by which search engines discover and evaluate web pages for inclusion in their index. This guide explains how Googlebot crawls the web, how robots.txt and XML sitemaps control crawl behavior, crawl budget and why it matters for large sites, the difference between crawling and indexing, JavaScript rendering delays that affect SPAs, noindex and nofollow directives, and how to use Google Search Console to monitor and accelerate indexing.