Seed URLs
Seed URLs are the starting addresses placed into a crawler before link extraction begins.
How it works
A seed can come from a prior crawl, a sitemap, a manual submission, a feed, or a link found on another host. Its quality determines which connected region of the web becomes reachable.
How to validate it
Record the entrypoint separately from later discoveries, then compare which pages become reachable from each seed set under the same page and depth budget.
Common failure
Treating every visited URL as a seed hides the actual discovery path and makes coverage comparisons impossible.
Machine-readable editions
The same article is available as Markdown and JSON. These alternates are linked here but are not submitted through the sitemap or IndexNow.