Gary Illyes from Google reiterated this morning that Googlebot, Google's crawler, does not parse JSON files. Instead, Googlebot just downloads the files and then the indexer does the rest.
Gary Illyes wrote on Bluesky:
Google's crawlers don't parse JSON, they just download things. Parsing anything is done by, for example, indexing in case of Search.
There are numerous steps in the fetching, crawling, indexing and serving process with Google Search.
But these bots are used across Google services. He was asked about Merchant Center and this applies there as well.
Gary responded:
We generally use shared infrastructure so we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. I'm very certain MC uses the same parser, but I never worked with that team.
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
Image credit to Lizzi
