Which property does a binary search tree maintain?

A binary search tree maintains the property that nodes are arranged such that each node's left child contains a value less than the node itself, and each right child contains a value greater than the node. This specific arrangement allows for efficient searching, insertion, and deletion operations, as it enables a binary search up and down the tree, eliminating half of the remaining nodes at each step based on comparisons.

This structure ensures that for any given node, all values in the left subtree are less than the value of the node, while all values in the right subtree are greater. Consequently, this organized structure facilitates ordered traversal and guarantees that searching for a value can be performed in logarithmic time complexity under optimal conditions, making it a highly efficient data structure for managing ordered data.