Submitting a URL is the process of sending the address of a web page or an entire website to various online registries, such as directories, directories, and most importantly, search engines (such as Google, Bing, etc.). This process aims to inform these platforms about the existence of the new or updated page so that it can be crawled (scanned), indexed, and subsequently displayed in search results.
In the past, when search engines were less sophisticated, site owners actively relied on manually adding URLs through special forms to speed up the discovery of their content. Today, although search engines have powerful robots that automatically discover and crawl new pages by following links from already indexed sites, manual addition can still be used.
Most often, this is done through the search engines’ specialized webmaster tools (e.g. Google Search Console). Using these tools to submit a sitemap or directly submit a new URL speeds up the indexing process and is an important part of the basics of search engine optimization (SEO).