Does the Interlinks Manager plugin crawl my website?

No, the Interlinks Manager plugin doesn’t crawl your website.

How the auto internal links are applied

The auto internal links are applied with the add_filter() WordPress function after the post is retrieved from the database and before the post is printed on the screen.

The exact priority used in the filter can be defined with the Filter Priority option available in the Options section of the Interlinks -> Options -> Automatic Links tab.

How the statistics available in the back-end are retrieved

The analysis performed on the Interlinks -> Dashboard, and Interlinks -> Juice menus are performed on demand by clicking the Update metrics button. In most cases, the scripts used to generate the statistics complete their execution in a few seconds.

When data are generated in the HTTP Status menu, the plugin performs HTTP requests to retrieve the response codes for the considered URLs. The plugin runs these requests using WP-Cron.