Crawling refers to the process of following hyperlinks to navigate from page to page and site to site to gather information about that website.

an action performed by a robot

The movement of a search engine spider (or bot) through the internet by following the links between sites.

the way a search engine robot moves through websites so as to define and categorise them.

Not swimming but the action a search engine's automated robot/spider completes when following links from web page to web page on the www.

the process by which search engine spiders retrieve web page information.

What spiders do. It refers to the action of following links to navigate from page to page and site to site.

What search engine bots or spiders do – visiting web pages and collecting data about them.

Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out ‘spiders' or ‘robots'. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text link is like a door.

See Spider

What the search engine software does when it visits your site and extracts content to include in its index. Also referred to as Website “spidering” or “scanning.