Glossary / Crawlability

What is Crawlability?

Crawlability is how easily a search engine's bot can reach and read your pages. If a bot cannot get to a page, that page cannot rank.

Bots find pages by following links, then reading whatever comes back. A page with no link pointing at it is invisible to them. So is a page behind a login, behind a form, or behind a button that only works once scripts run.

The common blockers are quiet ones. A stray rule in robots.txt, a broken chain of links, pages you can only reach through a search box, a server that times out. None of them look broken to a human clicking around.

Check it in Google Search Console. The URL Inspection tool shows whether Google can fetch a page and what it saw. Crawlability comes before every other piece of SEO work, because nothing else matters if the door is locked.