Understanding Search Engines: The Key to Better Visibility

Understanding how search engines work is essential for anyone who wants to be found online, whether through an online shop, corporate website, or blog. Those who understand how search engines find, evaluate, and display content can take targeted steps to become visible in search results.

Organic search is one of the most powerful channels in online marketing. Studies show that more than two-thirds of website traffic comes through search engines, especially Google. To ensure your content appears where potential customers are searching, it must first be discoverable and understandable to search engines. This requires a basic understanding of the technical processes used by Google and other search engines.

Those familiar with the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) quickly notice that search engines like Google have a clear goal: to provide the best possible answer to a specific search query. To achieve this, they analyze billions of web pages to find the most relevant content for a user’s query.

In other words, search engines no longer just compare words; they’re increasingly able to understand the context of a search. This means that, in addition to exact keywords, related terms, content structure and user experience also influence evaluation.

The focus is always on search intent. Google generally distinguishes between three types:

• Informational: Users want to learn or understand something.
• Transactional: Users want to buy something or complete an action.
• Navigational: Users are looking for a specific website or brand.

For a page to appear in search results, it must first be found. This is where the crawling process comes in. This is the first step in how search engines capture and evaluate content.

Search engines, such as Google, send automated programs, known as crawlers or spiders, onto the internet. The best-known is Googlebot. It begins with familiar websites and follows all the links it finds on these pages, similar to someone clicking from one Wikipedia article to the next. Each newly discovered URL is stored in a vast index. At Google, this index is called ‘Caffeine’.

A practical example: If a blog article is linked to by a well-known magazine, the crawler can access it. Without this connection, for example in the case of new pages without external links, the page may not be discovered, or it may be discovered with a delay. This is why internal linking is just as important as links from external sources.

However, not all pages of a website are crawled automatically. Crawling capacity per domain is limited. Google also prioritizes pages based on technical quality and relevance. Broken links, slow loading times, and unnecessary page variants (e.g. those with parameters) can result in valuable content being overlooked.

You can use the robots.txt file to define which areas of a website can be crawled. For instance, if you want to protect sensitive content (such as test environments) from public access, you can specify this in the file.

 page does not automatically become visible in the search results once it has been discovered by a crawler. To achieve this, it must be added to the index. The index is essentially the search engine’s memory. It is only at this point that the page can be considered as a result for a matching search query.

During indexing, Google analyzes a page’s content, structural elements (such as headings, metadata, and internal links), as well as technical details. The search engine then decides whether the page is relevant, accessible, and of sufficient quality to be included in the index.

Many pages fail due to technical issues that often go unnoticed. Common issues include missing or incorrect canonical tags, blocking directives in the robots.txt file, duplicate content, or poor mobile display. Problems can quickly arise, particularly on technically complex sites like online shops or platforms with filter functions. For example, dozens of URL variants may be generated that all display the same content.

You can easily check if your pages have been indexed: a ‘site:’ search in Google (e.g. site:mycompany.com) shows which pages of a domain are currently in the index. The Google Search Console page indexing report provides even more precise data, showing which pages were crawled but not indexed, and explaining why.

It is crucial that all content that is meant to be visible is technically sound and accessible. Anything that does not make it into the index simply does not exist from the search engine’s perspective—regardless of how good the content is.

Once a page is in the index, it can appear in search results for relevant search queries. But which of the many possible pages actually makes it onto the first results page? And which one ranks at the very top? This is where ranking comes into play.

To understand why some pages rank at the top of Google while others do not appear at all, you need to understand how search engines work. Visibility does not happen by chance—it follows clear mechanisms: content must be discovered, understood, and evaluated as relevant. What matters is not only what is on a page, but how it is prepared—technically, structurally, and content-wise.

At the same time, the rules of the game are constantly changing. Google is getting better at recognizing patterns and understanding the intent behind search queries. Anyone who wants to remain visible in the long term should consistently create content from the users’ perspective of the user, not just write for algorithms.

As AI plays an increasingly important role in digital marketing and Google delivers additional answers directly in the search results through AI Overviews, search behavior is changing noticeably. As a result, a combination of SEO and GEO to secure visibility across multiple touchpoints.