We have to stop infantilizing the story of how Googlebot’s work. For years, adults have been explaining a rather boring process with various theories about how Google “spiders” crawl and index websites. Many of these ideas, while well-intentioned, often misrepresent the sophisticated reality of Google’s operations. Let’s debunk a few persistent myths, particularly the notion that sitemaps are a direct “force” for Google to index your pages. As John Mueller often repeatedly clarifies that a sitemap is a hint – and not a to-do list.
Why all the different points of view on something so simple?
Expanded narrative: some of the most respected SEO agencies actually have been building the complex spider myth for over ten years, positing that they crawl and render EVER page to push the Spider UI appreciation story (even if not directly)
Actual Googlebots in the Real World
Googlebot is also a full chromium browser in order for it to execute Jaavascript. Why? Not so it can render your pages to assess it but because it has to be able to create a run-time environment to execute JavaScript in case it fetches text. With HTML output, all of the body text or content is contained in the full file. But when Googlebots fetch pages with JS, the text isn’t in the same document and in needs to be able to execute or run the whole script in order to get the content from the server. This used to be outsourced to a different process which just became a bottleneck and out of the flow so it became prudent to just give Googlebot the ability to do both. However, its given rise to the hypothesis that it enables Google to act as a browser and render pages. This is used as a basis to support the (often Web Dev philosophy) view that Googlebot renders pages just like a user – and sometimes the way Google talks about this – it sounds like thats exactly what they do. But they dont and Google has been clear although not emphatic that they do not render graphics and CSS to do UI/UX/Design analysis.
Common Googlebot Crawlers
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Googlebot (Desktop)
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Crawls the desktop version of web pages
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Googlebot (Smartphone)
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Crawls mobile versions for mobile-first indexing
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Googlebot-Image
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Crawls images for Google Images search
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Googlebot-Video
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Crawls video content for Google Video results
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This includes embedded video
- It doesnt understand or extract text from video
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Googlebot-News
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Crawls articles for Google News
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Google-InspectionTool
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Used by Search Console tools
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URL Inspection
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Rich Results Test
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GoogleOther:
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A new auxiliary crawler used for internal Google purposes (launched in 2023)
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AdsBot-Google: Crawls landing pages for Google Ads quality checks
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AdsBot-Google-Mobile: Crawls mobile ad landing pages
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Google Favicon
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Fetches favicons associated with websites
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Specialized and User Triggered Googlebot Crlawers
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Google Site Verifier: Used when verifying site ownership in Google Search Console.
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Google-InspectionTool: Triggered by tools like URL Inspection, Rich Results Test, or Mobile-Friendly Test.
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Feedfetcher: Fetches RSS and Atom feeds for Google services like Google Reader and Google Alerts.
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Google Publisher Center: Fetches content to manage and verify news and publisher data.
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Google Read Aloud: Fetches page content to generate and deliver audio for text-to-speech features.
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AMP Crawler: Validates Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on request.
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Safe Browsing: Checks URLs for security and safety when requested by users or tools.
Rethinking the Google Spider Concept: Your Sitemap Isn’t a Magic Indexer
Myth 1: Google Spiders “Crawl Whole Sites to Understand Them” (Like a Human)
The image of a diligent spider meticulously navigating every link on your site to “understand” its content is a compelling one, but it doesn’t quite capture the scale and efficiency of Google’s systems. While Googlebot (Google’s web crawler) does follow links, it’s not “reading” your site in the human sense to grasp its overall narrative.
Instead, Google employs incredibly complex algorithms and machine learning to process information at an unprecedented scale. They’re not just looking at the words on a page; they’re analyzing countless factors including links, content quality, user engagement signals, and much more, to build an understanding of a page’s relevance and authority. This “understanding” is less about a single spider’s journey and more about a distributed, data-driven analysis.
Myth 2: Google Renders Pages to Examine UI/UX
This is a common misconception, often leading to the idea that Google’s primary concern is to mimic a human user’s experience to judge your site’s “goodness.” While user experience (UX) is undeniably a ranking factor, Google isn’t rendering every page to meticulously scrutinize your button placement or font choices in the way a human designer would.
Google does render pages to understand their content, especially for dynamically loaded elements (like those built with JavaScript). As Gary Illyes has stated, “Googlebot renders pages like a modern browser.” This rendering is primarily to ensure they can see and process all the content, not to visually evaluate your UI/UX in a subjective way. Instead, signals related to UX, such as page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and Core Web Vitals, are algorithmically assessed based on quantifiable data.
Myth 3: Google Reads Sitemaps to Index Whole Sites
This is perhaps the most persistent myth regarding sitemaps. Many believe that submitting a sitemap is like giving Google a direct order: “Index these pages, now!” The reality, as articulated by Google’s John Mueller and often discussed by people on Reddit, is far more nuanced. John Mueller has repeatedly clarified that a sitemap is a hint, not a command. It’s a way to tell Google: “Here are some pages on my site that I think are important.” Google then takes this hint into consideration, alongside all its other discovery methods (like following links from other sites, internal links, and canonical tags).
Think of your sitemap as a helpful guide for a very busy librarian. The librarian appreciates the guide, but they’ll still use their own advanced cataloging systems and knowledge to find and organize books. If a page in your sitemap is low quality, duplicate, or otherwise deemed not worthy of indexing by Google’s algorithms, including it in your sitemap won’t magically make it appear in search results. Conversely, if a page is valuable and well-linked, Google will likely find and index it even if it’s not in your sitemap.
Google Explains (or tries to)
See if you can follow Gary Ylles as he explains what a Googlebot is – does it support the whole-site appreciation story?
The Real Picture about Googlebots vs the Web Spider
Its really boring but they are a fuzzy-logic (i.e. not a coordinated site explorer) FedEx courier of the search engine world, fetching documents, creating explore lists and dumping data in the indexing and processing engines.
Google’s indexing process is a complex, multi-faceted operation that constantly evolves. It involves:
- Crawling: Discovering URLs through various methods, including following links, sitemaps, and previous crawl data.
- Rendering: Processing the content of pages, almost exclusively if they containt JavaScript, to understand their full content.
- Indexing: Analyzing the content, categorizing it, and storing it in their massive index.
- Ranking: Determining the relevance and authority of pages for specific queries.
So, while your sitemap is a valuable tool in your SEO arsenal, don’t mistakenly believe it’s a “force multiplier” that bypasses Google’s sophisticated indexing logic. Focus on creating high-quality, valuable content, building a robust internal linking structure, and earning natural backlinks. These are the true drivers of discovery and ranking on Google.
