What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is an umbrella term that refers to two types of crawlers (desktop and mobile). Both Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Smartphone adhere to a user agent token in robots.txt. This means it’s impossible to specifically target one and not the other.

Googlebot visits websites and reads their content in order to add them to Google’s search index. This index is what powers Google search results. Therefore, it’s important for website owners to make sure that their sites can be found and read by Googlebot.

There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the most important is to use XML sitemaps. XML sitemaps are files that contain a list of all the pages on a website, and they help Googlebot find and crawl the site more easily.