What is Robot/ Bot?
Bots, or robots, are automated software programs that process web tasks such as crawling, indexing, and scraping data. Within SEO, web crawlers or spiders leap from one link to another to build and maintain search engine indexes. Other bots take care of tasks such as monitoring page metrics, testing site operations, or performing competitive reconnaissance. Effective bot management through directives in robots.txt files and rate-limit controls ensures that helpful crawlers can access your content while unwanted automation is blocked.
Examples of bots include Googlebot, which fetches pages for scanning and indexing; Bingbot, which updates its search index; and a scraping bot, which extracts product information from a competitor’s site.
Related terms: crawler, spider, user-agent, web scraper