Crawl
A crawl is the automated traversal of a site link by link, performed by search engine robots or by audit tools that replicate them. It reveals the site as machines actually see it — often different from expectations.
In practice
An audit crawl surfaces what the eye misses: redirect chains, orphaned pages, duplicate titles, excessive depths. On large sites, crawling by segment and comparing against server logs identifies what the tool reaches but Googlebot ignores, and vice versa — mapping the real problem areas rather than theoretical ones.