Crawlability is how easily automated bots — including AI crawlers — can access and parse a site's content. If a page cannot be reached or read through a crawl path, that path generally cannot index, ground, or cite it.
In plain terms
Blocked routes in robots.txt, content that only appears after heavy JavaScript, broken links, and messy markup all reduce crawlability.
For example, a key comparison page that renders only client-side may be invisible to a crawler that does not execute scripts.
Good crawlability means bots can fetch important pages and parse their meaning in server-rendered or otherwise accessible HTML.
Why it matters
A retriever cannot fetch a page through a path that the site blocks or fails to serve, so access and readable HTML are necessary for that retrieval path.
Successful crawling alone is not sufficient: indexing, ranking, query relevance, and provider behavior still determine whether the page is used.