How Google's Crawler Reads Your Pages (Googlebot)

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Why this matters

Before any optimization matters, Google's crawler has to find, download, and parse your page — if crawling breaks, nothing else in SEO matters. Understanding exactly what Googlebot does at each step lets you diagnose problems that no keyword tool will surface.

Try it yourself

Open Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool on one of your target pages and check the 'Last crawl' date and 'Crawled as' user-agent — verify it matches Googlebot Desktop or Smartphone.
Fetch the HTML of your homepage using curl -A 'Googlebot/2.1' https://yoursite.com and compare it to what a regular browser renders — note any differences that would affect what Google sees.
Check your server response headers for that same URL and confirm the HTTP status is 200 (not a redirect chain) by running curl -IL https://yoursite.com and counting the hops.

References

Google Search Central — How Google Search Works