How Search Engines Work
To do SEO well, you need to understand how search engines work. This guide explains the crawl, index, and rank process that determines whether your pages appear in Google's results.
Crawling
Search engines use bots (spiders) to discover pages by following links. Your site's link structure and XML sitemap help bots find all your pages.
Indexing
After crawling, Google stores and analyzes pages in its index. Pages not indexed cannot rank. Check indexation in Search Console.
Ranking
When a user searches, Google ranks indexed pages by relevance and authority using hundreds of signals — content quality, backlinks, speed, and more.
How AI Is Changing Search
AI engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews now generate answers directly, citing sources. This is driving the rise of AEO and GEO alongside traditional SEO.
Put it into practice
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