Technical Definition
Googlebot is Google's web crawling robot that discovers and indexes content. Two main types: Googlebot Smartphone (primary for mobile-first indexing) and Googlebot Desktop. Also specialized crawlers: Googlebot-Image, Googlebot-Video, Googlebot-News. Identify via user-agent string. Verify authenticity via reverse DNS lookup. Googlebot respects robots.txt and has limited JavaScript rendering capabilities.
Simple Explanation (ELI13)
Googlebot is Google's robot program that visits websites to find and download pages. It follows links from page to page, reads content, and sends it back to Google to be indexed. There are different Googlebots for regular pages, images, videos, and news. The mobile Googlebot is the main one Google uses now.
Related Terms
Crawling, User-Agent, Robots.txt, Crawl Budget
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