A bot, short for robot, is a computer program that performs online tasks automatically. Search bots, in particular, are employed by search engines such as Google and Bing to crawl and index content on the web.

These «crawlers» or «spiders» scan the pages, collect relevant data and store it in massive databases. This information is then used to determine which pages are displayed in response to users’ search queries.

Bots are not only used to crawl websites; They also play roles in chatbots, social media algorithms, and more.