# Staging crawl

Category: [Relaunch & Migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/relaunch-migration/) › [Planning & mapping](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/relaunch-migration/planning-mapping/) · Also known as: Pre-Launch-Crawl

A **staging crawl** is a crawl of the staging or development version of a website, run before the new version goes live. Technical problems show up while no visitor can see them. The term is common in SEO practice and has no formal definition.

## What gets checked?
Migration checklists suggest these checks on staging:

- redirects, canonical tags, XML sitemaps and structured data
- that the new URL structure matches the planned architecture
- page speed and Core Web Vitals against the values before the change
- that robots.txt blocks indexing of staging and allows it at launch (Siteimprove)

## Protecting the staging site
Ryte recommends HTTP authentication so that crawlers cannot reach staging at all. Google notes that robots.txt is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google and names `noindex` and password protection instead. A crawler used for the check then needs credentials or an allowed IP address (assessment).

## Example
Every page on the staging domain carries this tag:

```html
<link rel="canonical" href="https://staging.example.com/product/">
```

The crawl reveals that all canonicals point to staging. Fixed before launch, the tag never reaches the live site.

## Related terms

- [Baseline crawl](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/baseline-crawl/index.md)
- [Staging environment](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/staging-environment/index.md)
- [Go-live](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/go-live/index.md)
- [Website relaunch](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-relaunch/index.md)
- [Crawl comparison](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/crawl-comparison/index.md)
- [noindex](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/noindex/index.md)
- [robots.txt](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/robots-txt/index.md)

## More on the searchVIU blog

- [Why you shouldn’t block your entire staging environment via robots.txt](https://www.searchviu.com/en/robots-txt-staging-environment/)

## Sources

- [Introduction to robots.txt – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro)
- [Technical SEO during migrations – Siteimprove](https://www.siteimprove.com/blog/technical-seo-during-migrations/)
- [6 technical SEO mistakes to avoid in ecommerce website migration – Ryte (March 2022)](https://en.ryte.com/magazine/technical-seo-mistakes-ecommerce-website-migration/)

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Last updated: October 7, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/staging-crawl/