What is the first step in how Google processes webpages?

The correct answer is "Crawling the internet to find webpages." Before Google can rank, index, or analyze backlinks, it must first discover the webpages themselves. This discovery process is called crawling, where Google's automated programs (spiders or bots) follow links from known pages to new ones, identifying new and updated content across the web. "Ranking webpages based on relevance" is a later step, occurring after pages have been crawled and indexed. "Indexing webpages into a database" also happens after crawling; indexing is the process of storing and organizing the discovered information. "Checking for backlinks" is part of the ranking algorithm, but it cannot happen until the pages have been found and processed.