SEARCH OPS · The search visibility game by Manikandan Nagappan
The search world is broken.
Can you fix it?
Step inside fictional websites, read the evidence, change real files like robots.txt, templates and sitemaps, and watch a crawler react to every decision. You learn SEO by fixing it, not by answering quiz questions.
- Free, no sign-up
- 6 missions and 8 drills
- Rules based on Google’s documentation and RFC 9309
This rule hides the whole shop from crawlers. Change it so the shop is crawled but the cart stays private.
How a mission works
Every mission is a small website with a real problem. Nothing tells you the answer. The site itself does, once you know where to look.
Read the brief
A fictional client tells you what went wrong, in their own words.
Collect clues
Open reports, files and logs. Click any line to keep it as a clue.
File a change
Edit the real setting. Every change needs a clue that justifies it.
Run the crawl
Your avatar walks the site and every page shows what happened.
Close the case
Explain the cause with your clues, then see your score and what you learned.
Create your Field Unit
Name your Field Unit and pick a character. Each one reads the evidence through a different lens, so the same mission plays differently. Your unit stays in this browser only.
Crawl District · Explorer level
Choose your mission
Three cases for NovaCycles, a fictional bike shop, plus eight quick drills. Play them in any order; each one teaches a different crawling rule.
- Indexable
- Blocked by robots.txt
- Excluded by noindex
- Canonical uncertain
- Not discovered
- Redirect
- 404
- Points to a canonical
Your changes
Edit a draft of any editable file. Nothing changes on the site until you deploy with a change ticket.
Check any path against your robots.txt draft. Testing is free.
Close the case
The site is healthy again. Now explain what happened, using your clues. Select a blank, then select the clue that fills it.
Goal
- must be blocked
- must stay crawlable
Six worlds, one search universe
Crawl District opens first. The other worlds join over time, and later missions connect them, because real search problems rarely stay in one discipline.
Crawl District Live
robots.txt, crawling, indexing, links, canonicals and rendering.
Content Kingdom Coming
Search intent, topical coverage, entities and first-hand evidence.
Discovery Nexus Coming
How AI answers find, read and ground themselves in sources.
Signal Observatory Coming
Search Console, GA4, segmentation and honest measurement.
Automation Forge Coming
Crawlers, regex, data pipelines and safe agent workflows.
Strategy Citadel Coming
Budgets, trade-offs, stakeholders and priorities at scale.
The Field Manual
Every rule the crawler follows, in plain words. Each mission and drill uses some of them; the tag shows where.
The game models crawling only. It does not predict rankings, crawl timing or AI answers, and indexing is never guaranteed, even for a page with no blockers.
Sources the rules are based on
- RFC 9309, Robots Exclusion Protocol
- Google Search Central: introduction to robots.txt
- Google Search Help: pages blocked by robots.txt
- Also Google Search Central’s guides to noindex, crawlable links and sitemaps
Your runs
Scores from this browser. There is no public leaderboard yet, so nobody else can see these.
No runs yet. Your first score will appear here.
Keep reading
Technical SEO · Deep diveLog file analysis for SEO and AI crawlersSee what crawlers actually request, verify Googlebot and find crawl waste.
Technical SEO · JavaScriptJavaScript SEO: the render gap for Google and AI crawlersRaw HTML, rendered DOM and blocked resources, compared.
How-to · Field guideSEO checklist for Google & AI search28+ checks for access, content quality, trust and AI visibility, with a workbook.Questions about the game, or a real crawl problem?
Send me a note. I read every one.