Crawlability
How easily search engine bots can access, read, and index a website's pages and content.
Definition
Crawlability refers to a search engine's ability to access and scan website content. Technical factors like robots.txt directives, site architecture, internal linking, and server response times determine how effectively crawlers can discover and process pages.
Poor crawlability means search engines can't find or index content, regardless of its quality. Sites with crawlability issues are essentially invisible to search despite having valuable content.
Why It Matters
No crawlability means no organic traffic—period. If search engines can't access your content, it doesn't exist in search results. Fixing crawlability issues often produces dramatic traffic increases.
Crawlability becomes more critical as sites grow. Large sites must be strategic about how crawl budget is allocated, ensuring important pages get crawled while blocking irrelevant content.
Examples in Practice
A site audit reveals that JavaScript rendering issues block Google from seeing 60% of page content—fixing this doubles organic traffic within weeks.
A redesign accidentally blocks the entire site in robots.txt, and organic traffic drops 95% until the error is discovered and fixed.
A large e-commerce site improves crawlability through better internal linking, resulting in 30% more product pages being indexed.