Google Search Console users experience crawl stats report data issue

Between March 10th and March 23rd Google said there was an “internal reporting issue” with the crawl stats report within Search Console. This data issue only impacted the reporting tools and had no impact on your Google Search performance.

You may see a drop in your crawl data in that specific report, but that reporting drop is just a reporting issue and not an actual issue with your Google crawl activity.

What Google said. Google said between March 10 through March 23, 2021 “you may see a drop in data in this period due to an internal reporting issue,” the company said. Google clarified “this issue did not affect actual page fetches, only the reporting of fetch activity during this period.”

Crawl stats report. The crawl stats report can be accessed here in Google Search Console. This report shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website, for instance, how many requests were made and when, what your server response was, and any availability issues encountered. You can use this report to detect whether Google encounters serving problems when crawling your site.

Here is a sample of this report but you can learn more about the report here:

Why we care. Do not be alarmed if you see a drop in your crawl activity during this timeframe. A reporting glitch does not mean you had any issues with Google crawling or accessing your website. Instead, compare the crawl activity to previous similar weeks to later similar weeks to see if there are issues. But do not use the March 10th through March 23rd timeframe for any analysis of your site’s accessibility health.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.