What is Googlebot?
Googlebot is the name of the web crawler Google uses to crawl and collect the content of webpages. Once crawled, the content may be indexed and displayed on Google search engine result pages.
The term ‘Googlebot’ actually refers to two web crawlers:
- Googlebot Desktop
- Googlebot Smartphone
As the name implies, Google Desktop imitates a desktop browser, while Google Smartphone imitates a smartphone browser.
Both crawlers identify as Googlebot and will obey robots.txt rules targeted at Googlebot. However, your site is likely to receive more visits from Googlebot Smartphone since Google gives more priority to mobile devices.
Google also has a few other crawlers, namely:
- Googlebot Image — Used for crawling images.
- Googlebot Video — Used for crawling videos.
- Googlebot News — Used for crawling news articles for Google News.