Google crawl stats report now showing more crawls

Google has posted an update on its new crawl stats report saying “the crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls.” This means you may see an increase in the number of crawls reported for your site but this is just a reporting change – there is no direct impact in search.

Crawl stats report. Google, back in November 2020, launched the new crawl stats report. You can check it out over here if you have not seen it. The crawl stats report shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website.

What has changed. Google has updated the report to show more types of crawls. It is unclear what “types of crawls” means exactly. It might refer to Googlebot types, including not just Googlebot for search but Adbot for Google Ads, Imagebot and more. Google wrote “The crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls. As a result, you may see a jump in the number of crawls reported for your site. This does not reflect additional crawling of your site, only improved reporting.”

What it looks like. Here is a screen shot showing the notification in the crawl stats report:

Why we care. If you notice a bump in your crawl rate, do not be alarmed. Google is simply showing more types of crawls to your website. It does not mean Google is crawling your website more often but rather just reporting on more of the types of crawls your site has received.