A web crawler (also called a spider or bot) starts from one or more seed URLs, downloads each page, extracts its links and queues the new URLs it discovers. It repeats this until it runs out of links or reaches a limit you set.
Search engines and AI assistants run crawlers to discover and read content. SEO teams run their own crawlers to see a site the way those bots do: which pages exist, how they link together and what each one returns.
If a page cannot be reached by following links, most crawlers will not find it, and neither will the search engines and AI systems that rely on crawling.
Running your own crawl is the fastest way to find broken links, redirect problems and missing metadata before a search engine or a client does.
VisibilityKit Crawler is a desktop web crawler for macOS, Windows and Linux. It crawls your site, lists every issue it finds and lets you re-check each page after a fix.
Crawl data is stored on your own machine. VisibilityKit runs no crawl server and never sees your crawls.
Not quite. A crawler discovers pages by following links. A scraper extracts specific data from pages. Many tools do both, and custom extraction adds scraping to a crawl.
A well-behaved crawler limits how many requests it makes at once. Crawl a staging site or run during quiet hours if your server is fragile.
A crawler built to audit a website for technical SEO issues such as broken links, redirects, missing titles and canonical problems.
The number of clicks a page sits away from the start URL, usually the homepage.
How many URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on your site in a given period.
The process by which AI platforms discover and index web content for use in generating responses.
A systematic check of a website's crawlability, indexability, links, redirects and on-page elements.
A desktop SEO crawler for macOS, Windows and Linux. Find what is broken, assign the work, then verify every fix. Crawl data stays on your machine.
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