How search works
How search engines workThe five steps from discovery to rankingComponentsThe parts that make a search engine runCrawlingHow bots find and fetch your pagesIndexingHow a page gets stored so it can be foundCheck if indexedFour ways to confirm a page is on GoogleCrawling and indexing
Web crawlersGooglebot, Bingbot and the new AI botsGooglebotHow Google's crawler reads your siteRobots.txtRules, examples and a free testerXML sitemapCreate one, then submit it to GoogleCanonical tagPick the main version of a pageNoindex tagKeep a page out of search resultsRanking and results
Search engine rankingWhy one page appears above anotherGoogle ranking factorsWhat really matters, grouped simplyPageRankHow links pass value between pagesAlgorithmsTF-IDF, PageRank and modern rankingResults page (SERP)What each block on the page is forAI searchHow AI answers are built from the indexUnderstand
What is a search engineA plain definition with real examplesTypes of search enginesCrawler, meta, vertical, private and AIBrowser vs search engineTwo tools that people often mix upExplore
Best search enginesGoogle, Bing, DuckDuckGo and moreUses of search enginesThe everyday jobs that search handlesHistory of search enginesFrom Archie in 1990 to AI answersThis page explains how guides on Search Engine Basics are researched, written, checked and corrected. It sets out the standards every page has to meet before it goes live.
Standards
Four standards apply to every guide on the site, whatever the topic.
Every claim has to be correct for the way search engines work today. When we are unsure about a detail, we leave it out instead of guessing.
Guides are checked against the public documentation that Google and Bing publish for site owners. We rely on those first-hand sources over secondhand opinion.
Each guide is written for beginners, so technical terms are explained in simple words the first time they appear.
Every guide shows the date it was last updated at the top of the page. That date changes whenever the content itself changes.
Testing
Advice on this site should work in practice, which is why claims are tested before they are recommended.
When a guide suggests a change, such as a sitemap setting or an indexing fix, the idea is first tried on live websites. Only methods that behave as described make it into a guide.
When a guide reports the result of a test, it shares the method along with screenshots, so you can see exactly what was done and repeat it yourself.
Independence
What appears in a guide is decided by what helps readers understand search, with no outside influence.
Corrections
Mistakes can slip through despite careful checks, so there is a simple process for reporting and fixing them.
AI use
We may use AI tools to help with research and drafting, but every guide is written, fact-checked and approved by a human editor before it is published.
No page is published straight from an AI draft, because each one passes the same human review described on this page.
Questions
If something in this policy is unclear, or you think a guide falls short of it, please get in touch. You can also read more about the site or meet Usman Ali, who writes the guides.