These are the proceedings of the First Workshop on GRAPH Inspection and Traversal Engineering (GRAPHITE 2012), which took place on April 1, 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia, as a satellite event of the 15th European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2012). The topic of the GRAPHITE workshop is graph search in all its forms in computer science. Graph search algorithms tend to have common characteristics, such as duplicate state detection, independent of their application domain. Over the past few years, it has been shown that the scalability of such algorithms can be dramatically improved by using, e.g., external memory, by exploiting parallel architectures, such as clusters, multi-core CPUs, and graphics processing units, and by using heuristics to guide the search. The goal of this event is to gather scientists from different communities, such as model checking, artificial intelligence planning, game playing, and algorithm engineering, who do research on graph search algorithms, such that awareness of each others' work is increased.