Crawlability

Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots and AI crawlers can discover, access, and navigate through the pages of your website. A site with good crawlability allows bots to efficiently find and index all important content without encountering barriers like broken links, infinite loops, or blocked resources.

Factors affecting crawlability include robots.txt directives, XML sitemap quality, internal linking structure, site architecture depth, JavaScript rendering requirements, and server response times. Crawl budget — the number of pages a bot will crawl in a given timeframe — is particularly important for large websites.

For AI optimization, crawlability extends to ensuring AI-specific crawlers can access your content. This means reviewing robots.txt to allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, providing clean HTML rather than JavaScript-rendered content where possible, and maintaining a logical site hierarchy that bots can navigate efficiently.