Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about Googlebot crawling and the completeness of the snapshot. The person asking the question received a response that touched on edge cases and temporal anomalies in crawling.
A Googlebot “screenshot” refers to a representation of what a web page looks like to Googlebot.
What a web page looks like depends on how it renders the page after executing JavaScript, loading CSS and downloading necessary images.
Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool gives an idea of what a web page looks like to Google. This tool helps publishers and SEOs understand how Google “sees” a web page.
Question About Knowing What Googlebot “Sees”
The person asking the question was talking about Googlebot screenshots. What they apparently meant was the rendered page as Googlebot itself sees it.
This is the question the Redditor asked:
“Is the Googlebot screenshot a complete picture of what Google can see?”
They later clarified with the following answers to questions:
“How can I know what google see in my article? …I want to know what Googlebot see in my website.”
Is Googlebot Screenshot A Complete Picture?
Returning to the original question of whether the “Googlebot screenshot a complete picture of what Google can see,” Google’s John Mueller offered the following answer.
“For the most part, yes. But there are some edge cases and temporal anomalies. Tell us more about what you’re trying to check.”
Mueller’s response acknowledges that the Googlebot screenshot represents what Google sees when it crawls a page.
Temporal Anomalies In Googlebot Screenshot
The person asking the question referred to a Googlebot screenshot as what Googlebot “sees” when it visits a web page. That also seems to be the context of Mueller’s answer.
Mueller’s answer referred to temporal anomalies which could be a reference to temporary issues at the time the web page was crawled that could have effected what resources were downloaded and consequently affected how the web page looked to Googlebot in that moment.
Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool also provides a snapshot that shows a live preview of how a web page appears to Google. It’s a good way to check if everything is rendered by Google the way it’s supposed to look.
Read the discussion on Reddit:
Is the Googlebot screenshot a complete picture of what Google can see?
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