Google has clarified how its Googlebot ranks pages, saying it will automatically index the first 15MB of a page.

As the dominant search engine by a wide margin, many websites live or die by their Google rankings. As a result, understanding exactly how it works is the goal of many a webmaster. Google has shed a bit more light on the topic, outlining how its Googlebot crawls and indexes pages:

Googlebot can crawl the first 15MB of content in an HTML file or supported text-based file. After the first 15MB of the file, Googlebot stops crawling and only considers the first 15MB of content for indexing.

The tidbit is important, giving webmasters a target to shoot for. The 15MB limit should also encourage the design of lean, performant websites, ones that are equally suitable on a smartphone as a desktop with a high-speed connection.