Web Crawlers List: 10 Most Common Bots & Spiders

Struggling to keep your website updated and SEO-friendly with lots of changes? It can be a daunting task to manually inform search engines about every change on your website, especially with its extensive content.

How can you make sure that updating your content often helps your website rank better in search results? It’s a real challenge to keep everything updated and make sure search engines notice.

The answer is using crawler bots. These search engine bots go through your website, find new updates, and help improve your SEO. In this blog, we’ve put together a web crawlers list that will make your job easier and smoother.

Let’s get started and make your website shine!

What Are Web Crawlers?

A web crawler, also known as a spider or bot, is a computer program used by search engines to explore the internet.

It systematically browses the web to gather information about websites and their content.

The main job of a web crawler is to collect data from websites so that search engines can create an index.

This index helps search engines quickly find relevant information when you do a search.

How do Web Crawlers Work?

The web crawler starts with a list of websites. Think of this as its starting point or to-do list.

The crawler visits each website on the list. It reads the content of each page, as same as reading a book.

As it scans the page, it finds links to other pages and websites. The crawler then follows these links and keep adding new page to the list.

The crawler collects information from each page it visits. This includes the text, images, and any other content.

It also looks at keywords, which are important words or phrases that describe what the page is about.

The information gathered is then stored in a huge database called an index. This index is like a library where search engines can quickly find and retrieve information.

Web crawlers don’t just visit websites once. They keep coming back to check for new or updated content. This ensures the search engine’s index is always up-to-date.

Types of Web Crawlers

• In-House Crawlers: In-house crawlers are custom-built by organizations to suit their specific requirements. These crawlers are developed internally, typically by a team of developers or engineers within the organization.

• Open-Source Crawlers: These are freely available crawlers with source code that can be modified and used by anyone. For instance Apache Nutch, Scrapy etc.

• Commercial Crawlers: Commercial crawlers are software solutions offered by companies as a service usually with a subscription fee. For example Moz, SEMrush, Screaming Frog etc.

Best Web Crawlers List

Here are some of best web crawler examples which you may consider.

1. Google Bot

Googlebot is the generic name for Google’s web crawling bot.

It’s an automated program also called a spider or bot that systematically browses the internet, collecting information about websites to add to Google’s index.

When Google visits your website, it identifies itself using a user-agent string, which includes a token specifying it is Googlebot.

This token helps web servers recognize the type of device or software making the request.

Google bot has typically two version Google bot Smartphones and Google bot desktop.

These versions help Google index content based on how users access websites from different devices. However, some experts consider these different crawler version as single only.

Key Features of Googlebot

• Politeness: Googlebot is designed to be polite. It respects the rules set in a website’s robots.txt file, which can specify which pages should not be crawled and how frequently the bot can visit the site.

• Mobile-First Indexing: Googlebot uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. This reflects the increasing number of users accessing the web through mobile devices.

• Crawl Budget: Google allocates a crawl budget to each site, which is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl within a given timeframe

2. Bing Bot

Bing bot is Microsoft’s web crawler used to index web pages for the Bing search engine. Like Googlebot, Bing bot is an essential tool for gathering and updating web content in Bing’s search index.

This bot helps ensure that Bing’s search results are comprehensive and up-to-date.

Key Features of Bing Bot

• Smart Detection: Bingbot uses advanced algorithms to prioritize and manage crawling. It balances the load on websites and avoids overloading servers.

• User-Agent Strings: Bingbot identifies itself with specific user-agent strings.

• Rendering: Bing Bot can render web pages to understand their content, including text, images, and multimedia.

• Mobile-friendliness: It prioritizes mobile-friendly web pages for indexing and ranking in search results.

3. Duckduck Bot

DuckDuckBot is the web crawler for DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine that emphasizes user privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results.

It aims to provide unbiased search results by not tracking users’ search histories or profiling them.

Key Features of DuckDuckGo Bot

• Privacy Focus: DuckDuckGo emphasizes user privacy. DuckDuckBot respects robots.txt files and follows the guidelines specified by webmasters to avoid overloading servers.

• Instant Answers: This Bot provides instant answers to search queries, displaying relevant information directly on the search results page.

• Updating Index: It regularly revisits pages to check for updates, ensuring that the index reflects the most current version of each page.

• Zero-click Info: DuckDuckGo Bot offers “zero-click” info, providing direct answers to search queries without the need to click on any search results.

4. Yandex Bot

YandexBot, is the web crawler used by Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia.

It plays a crucial role in indexing web pages and ensuring that Yandex’s search results are comprehensive.

Key Features of Yandex Bot

• Efficiency: YandexBot uses advanced algorithms to manage and prioritize crawling, ensuring efficient use of resources and minimal impact on website performance.

• Language support: Yandex Bot supports multiple languages, allowing it to index and display search results in various languages.

• Image search: It can also crawl and index images on the web, making them searchable through Yandex’s image search feature.

• Geographical relevance: Yandex Bot can prioritize search results based on geographical location, providing relevant local search results to users.

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5. Apple Bot

Another one on the Web Crawlers List is Applebot, it was introduced by Apple back in 2015. This is the web crawler used by Apple, the company behind the Safari web browser. 

Like all we discussed before, This also crawls the web to find new web pages and updates existing ones and is designed to work well with Apple’s ecosystem of products and services.

Key Features of Apple Bot

• Applebot’s Integration with Siri and Spotlight: AppleBot is utilized by various Apple products, including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions, according to the company.

• Factors Influencing Applebot’s Search Indexing: Applebot uses some of the criteria to index search results based on user engagement, relevance of content, quality of external links, user location signals, and webpage design characteristics. These factors influence how search results are displayed to users.

• Rendering Capabilities: Applebot can render JavaScript and CSS, meaning it can process dynamically loaded content on websites, unlike some older search engine crawlers. This ensures that Applebot “sees” the web page as a user would.

• Functional Similarities to Googlebot: Applebot works like Google’s Googlebot and can understand Googlebot instructions if there are not any specific instructions for Applebot.

6. Swift Bot

Swiftbot is Swiftype’s web crawler that is used to retrieve information from website in order to make your website searchable used by the Swift search engine, which is designed to be fast and efficient.

It crawls the web to find new web pages and updates existing ones to make them searchable on SERPs and is used by several smaller search engines.

Key Features of Swift Bot

• Customized Website Indexing with Swiftype: Swiftype is especially useful for websites with many pages, offering a user-friendly interface to effectively catalog and index all pages.

• Custom Crawl: Generally most web crawlers automatically crawl all websites to build a comprehensive search index of the web, But unlike all, Swiftbot only crawls websites that the customers specifically request to crawl.

• Easy Website Indexing with Swiftype: Swiftbot offers a simple and straightforward way to index your website’s content for search. Compared to using the Swiftype API, using the web crawler requires less technical expertise and allows you to set up site searches more quickly and easily.

• Website Crawling Similarities to Google: Swiftype’s crawler collects and indexes data from your website like how Google crawls data for its global search engine.

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7. Slurp Bot

Another bot in this crawler catalog is Slurp Bot. This web crawler used by Yahoo to index web pages for its search engine.

Although Yahoo’s search results are now powered by Bing, Slurp Bot still plays a role in indexing content for Yahoo services. It works by visiting websites and gathering information to include in Yahoo!’s search results.

Key Features of Slurp Bot

• Crawling: The bot systematically visits web pages to collect information and index them in Yahoo!’s search database.

• User-Agent Strings: Slurp Bot identifies itself with specific user-agent strings.

• Process Structured Data: Slurp Bot processes structured data to better understand the content and context of web pages.

• Multimedia support: It can crawl and index various types of media, including images and videos, to include in Yahoo!’s search results.

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8. Baidu Spider

Baidu Spider is the web crawler used by Baidu, the most popular search engine in China.

As you know that Google doesn’t work in China that’s why the Baidu Bot is needed when targeting Chinese SERP

Key Features of Baidu Spider

• Automatic Site Scanning and Crawling: The Baidu spider automatically scans your site for new updates. If this affects your site’s performance, you can adjust the crawling rate in your Baidu Webmaster Tools account.

• Language Focus: Given Baidu’s primary user base, Baidu Spider has a strong focus on Chinese-language content, although it can crawl pages in other languages as well.

• Analyzing Crawling Issues: If you don’t want to let Baidu Spider’s activity on your site, look for user agents such as Baidu spider, Baidu spider-image, Baidu spider-video, and similar identifiers. If any of these user agents are found on your site, it means the Baidu spider is crawling your site.

• Identifying Baidu Spider Activity on Your Site: Baidu is one of the top search engines in the world and it holds an 80% market share in mainland China’s search engine market.

9. Facebook External Hit

Facebook External Hit also know as Facebook Crawler that crawls HTML of an app or website which is shared on Facebook.

The crawler collects, stores, and shows details about the app or website, including its title, description, and thumbnail image.

Key Features of Facebook External Hit

• Content gathering: When a link from a website is shared on Facebook, the External Hit server accesses the site to collect information for the shared post, such as the title, description, and image.

• Post preview: The information gathered from the website is used to create a preview of the shared link on Facebook, allowing users to see a snippet of the content before clicking on the link.

• Analyzing Shared Web Content: The Facebook Crawler analyzes the HTML of a website or app that is shared on Facebook.

• Facebook’s Advertising-Enhancing Crawler: One of Facebook’s main crawling bots is Facebot, which helps improve advertising performance.

10. SEMrushBot

SEMrushBot is a commercial web crawling bot used by the SEMrush platform to collect data from websites and in return fee is charged.

It visits web pages to gather information that is used for analyzing a site’s performance in search engines and providing insights for digital marketing strategies.

Key Features of SEMrushBot

• Data collection: It systematically visits web pages to gather information such as keywords, backlinks, and rankings to provide insights for search engine optimization and digital marketing efforts.

• Website analysis: SEMrushBot collects data to analyze a website’s performance, including its visibility in search results, traffic, and potential areas for improvement.

• Competitor research: It gathers data on competitors’ websites to help users understand their strategies and performance in search engines.

• Backlink analysis: It gathers data on backlinks pointing to a website, which helps users understand their link profile and identify opportunities for improving their backlink strategy.

Wrapping Up

That’s the end of this crawler catalog. Web crawlers are important for sorting and organizing internet content. The 10 most common bots and spiders in 2024, such as Google Bot and Bing Bot, are crucial for finding and categorizing web pages, which affects the search results people see.

Knowing about these web crawlers and how they work can help website owners and marketers improve their online presence.

As technology advances, these web crawlers will likely become even better at navigating and understanding the web.

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FAQs on Web Crawlers List