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SEO & AEO

Crawlability

Also known as: crawlable · crawl accessibility

Definition

Crawlability is how easily a search engine's bots can reach a site's pages and read their content, following links without being stopped by blocking rules, server errors, logins or scripts. A page the bots cannot fetch cannot be understood, whatever it says.

Crawlability is the first of three separate questions: can bots reach the page, may they store it, and will it rank. The usual blockers are a robots.txt rule that disallows a folder, pages that no internal link points to, server errors or very slow responses, content that appears only after a login or a click, and endless URL combinations created by filters and calendars.

Bilingual sites add their own traps. A language switcher built as a script instead of a plain link can hide every Arabic page from a crawler, and an automatic redirect by visitor location or browser language can stop a crawler ever seeing the other version. Each language version needs a path to it that a bot can follow without making a choice.

URL Inspection in Google Search Console shows what Google fetched and how it rendered the page, which is a better test than your own browser. For a quick crawler's-eye check, turn JavaScript off and see whether the navigation still exists as links. Fix access first, because content work on pages bots cannot reach is wasted.

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