What Is the Role of a “Searcher” in the MEV Ecosystem?

A "searcher" is a specialized actor, typically a bot or an automated program, that monitors the mempool for profitable MEV opportunities, such as arbitrage, liquidations, or sandwich attacks. Once a profitable opportunity is identified, the searcher constructs a transaction bundle to execute the strategy and bids a high transaction fee to a miner or validator to ensure its inclusion in the next block.

Searchers are the economic drivers of MEV extraction.